Aroosa Kanwal (Auth.) - Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction - Beyond 9 - 11-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015)

Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
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Rethinking Identities
in Contemporary
Pakistani Fiction
Beyond 9/11
Aroosa Kanwal
International Islamic University, Pakistan
© 2015 Aroosa Kanwal
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For my parents
I certainly could not have done it without their support
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 How the World Changed: Narratives of Nationhood
and Displaced Muslim Identities 18
2 Responding to 9/11: Contextualising the Subcontinent
and Beyond 73
3 Re-imagining Home Spaces: Pre- and Post-9/11
Constructions of Home and Pakistani Muslim Identity 112
4 Global Ummah: Negotiating Transnational Muslim Identities 157
Coda: Re-imagining Pakistan 198
Notes 201
Bibliography 208
Index 219
vii
Acknowledgements
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds
I am indebted to numerous people for their support during the writ-

ing of this book. For its early intellectual formations, I am particularly
thankful to Dr Lindsey Moore, my exemplary PhD advisor at the
University of Lancaster, UK, whose invaluable critique, gentle wisdom
and great patience forced me to explain myself more fully; I have learnt
so much from you. I am also indebted to Dr Claire Chambers for her
intellectual feedback and valuable suggestions, prompting me to look at
aspects I would otherwise have missed. Special thanks to Dr Sarah Post
for her advice to improve the Introduction. On a personal note, I am
especially grateful to Professor Lynne Pearce for her constant support,
encouragement and for the prompt communication at all times, from
the time of writing the book proposal to the completion of the manu-
script. I owe particular thanks to Alan McIntosh and Palgrave editors
Benjamin Doyle and Tomas Rene for their patient guidance.
I would like to thank my mother and father for their unfaltering sup-
port, love and prayers. Without their encouragement and help I would
not have been able to write this book. My thanks are due to my fam-
ily for the co-operation and help they extended to me throughout my
research work.
I feel very lucky to have Professor S.M.A. Rauf as my mentor. I would
particularly like to thank him for inspiring me to pursue my ambitions.
I also owe a special thank you to Dr Hassan Ahmed not only for the
laborious task of editing my work but also for supporting me in all ways
to bring this book to its final fruition. Many thanks to Valerie Smith for
rich and friendly intellectual debates. I am so grateful to both of you for
lifting my spirits, and for too many other things to enumerate.
Thanks to Lucy Perry for all the motivation and inspiration. I am very
grateful to Waleed and Ahmed for endless discussions on politics and
history. I would like to extend my gratitude beyond the academic circle
to thank Paula, Vijaya, Novida, Maria, Tajmina, Saiyma, Nighat, Komal,
Sofia, Amal and Uzma for their prayers, best wishes and ever-present
support. A special note of thanks goes to all those colleagues and stu-
dents at International Islamic University not named here, but who gave
viii
Acknowledgements ix
me strength and motivation throughout. Thanks to Dr Munazza Yaqoob

for making my return to the university easier for me.
A part of Chapter 3 was published as “After 9/11: Islamophobia in
Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows” in Imagining Muslims
in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations, ed. by
Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert (UK: Routledge, 2014) 185–197.
A shorter version of a section in Chapter 4 was published as “After
9/11: Trauma, Memory, Melancholia and National Consciousness” in
Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2011, ed. by Daniel Meyer-
Dinkgräfe (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) 57–66. I am
grateful to Routledge and Cambridge Scholars Publishing for permissions
to reproduce the copyright material.
Introduction
In Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, Olivier Roy points out
that the “construction of a ‘deculturalised’ Islam is a means of experi-
encing a religious [or Muslim] identity that is not linked to a given cul-
ture and can therefore fit with every culture, or, more precisely, could be
defined beyond the very notion of culture. The issue is one not only of
recasting an Islamic identity, but also of formulating it in explicit terms”
(23–24). This need to reconceptualise and reconstruct Muslim identities
is particularly urgent in relation to the “times of political crisis (such
as 9/11), [in which] ordinary Muslims feel compelled (or are explicitly
asked) to explain what it means to be a Muslim … To publicly state
self-identity has become almost a civic duty for Muslims” (Roy 23–24).
A post-9/11 tendency in Western public discourses to homogenise all
Muslims irrespective of their culture and background has increasingly
resulted in the multiple articulation of (Pakistani) Muslim identities in
both local and translocal spaces. These connections between current
negotiations of national, Muslim and diasporic identities and Islam’s
troubled relationship with the West1 mean that it is especially impor-
tant to think about how to look beyond 9/11.
This monograph, in its focus on the representations of and by
Pakistani Muslims after 9/11, specifically addresses the way definitions
of home and identity have continued to be re-inflected and renegoti-
ated, both in Pakistan and in the diaspora as a result of international
“war on terror” rhetoric. In so doing, it uniquely links the post-9/11
stereotyping of Muslims and Islam in the West to the roots of current
jihadism and Islamic extremism within the subcontinent and beyond,
in order to foreground the effects of terrorism debates on Pakistanis at
home and in the diaspora. Indubitably, fiction based on the “war on
terror” has been undergoing a constant process of evolution over the
1
2 Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
last decade, and it is important to document the way that Pakistani

writers are “writing back” to these dominant Western discourses in
order to redress the relative marginalisation of Muslims in the West. In
this context, my aim throughout this book is to highlight not only the
national and international religious and political grievances that drive
extremism but also to foreground Anglo-American foreign policy (in
my case in the Muslim world) as a form of terrorism. My purpose in
this monograph is to provide a historical depth to current negotiations
of national, Muslim and diasporic identities, and to historicise con-
temporary encounters between the West and Muslims/Islam. For this
reason, I move between the subcontinent and Pakistani diasporas in the
UK and the US, so as to attend to issues surrounding the resurgence of
different forms of Islam (and ethnocentrism) in Pakistan, Afghanistan
and the Middle East from the late 1970s onwards, and their links to
a global ummah. Through historical contextualisation of the “9/11
novel” category, this book crucially provides a more nuanced account
of religion, extremism and US realpolitik. I am particularly interested in
the ways in which second-generation writers, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem
Aslam and Uzma Aslam Khan, problematise identity crises resulting
from the current antagonism towards Muslims and Islam, focusing on
Pakistani migrants’ struggles with hyphenated identities in the context
of the sometimes xenophobic imaginary of “the West”. Accentuating
the broad interface between national and international scenarios in
their fiction, I draw upon numerous interlinking contexts to illumi-
nate a spectrum of locations (local, regional and global; national,
transnational and international) that are mutually informative in the
construction of post-9/11 (Pakistani) Muslim identities.
Pakistani Muslim identities in the aftermath of 9/11
Fictional representations of Islam and Muslim identities by writers of

Pakistani origin have received increased attention, especially in the
post-9/11 political climate with its attendant reductive representations
of Islamic fundamentalism. After the September 11 attacks, Islam has
emerged as a key conceptual category to (re)construct Pakistani identi-
ties as a result of changed societal perceptions about Muslims in the
West. The “war on terror”, which has had the effect of equating Islam
and Muslims with terrorism, has become a dominant political narrative
in Europe and the US over the last decade. In this context, Valentina
Bartolucci usefully examines ways in which the terms “radicalism” and
“terrorism” are conflated in the post-9/11 world, suggesting further that
Introduction 3
terrorism is “uniquely seen as ‘Islamic terrorism’ [and that] all Muslims

come to be casually linked to terrorism” (562–82). Mainstream Western
narratives about suicide bombing, religious fanaticism, terrorism, jihad
and Islamic fundamentalism in the post-9/11 context have resulted in
the articulation of a new orthodoxy towards Islam and Muslims. As a
result, Arjun Appadurai argues that over the last decade perceptions
about Muslims have changed from a “terrorized minority to a terrifying
majority, the Muslim world itself” (Fear 111). The second-generation
writings, both aesthetic and polemic, that I consider in this monograph
confront these negative international attitudes towards Muslims and
Islam.
The purpose of my work here is not image correction as such.
However, my own affiliation with Pakistan and Islam generates my
interest in the ways in which fictional representations affect the image
of a nation, both at home in Pakistan and across the globe. I propose
here that, as a result of ongoing Islamophobia debates in the West,
negative images of Muslims have continued to shape Western attitudes
and speech in such a way that the figure of a Muslim has become a
metaphor for barbarism and violence, meaning that Muslimness has
become synonymous with terror. I agree with Shamsie’s argument that
it is hard to be a Muslim in a post-9/11 world and “not be aware of
‘Muslimness’ … You get asked: are you a Muslim? Yes! And you hear all
kinds of things being said about Muslims. And you start to feel yourself
being Muslim in a way you never felt before. People will say: So what is
it about Islam that makes people turn to violence?” (Kramatschek n.p.).
As part of the same phenomenon, Pakistan has also emerged as a lead-
ing locus of terrorism in the world. “War on terror” rhetoric has acceler-
ated a shift from Orientalist epistemology to terrorist ontology, a phrase
that I use to refer to a post-9/11 climate in which “Muslimness” has
become synonymous with terror(ism) and violence and in which every
Muslim can easily be labelled as a terrorist (through the conflationary
rhetoric of Arab/Muslim identities as well as of Islamic fundamentalism/
extremism).
“Islamophobia”, an increasingly contested term, has a plethora of
interpretations, yet there is no widely accepted definition. In research
conducted by the Runnymede Trust (1997), the Islamic Human Rights
Commission IHRC (2002) and European Monitoring Centre on Racism
and Xenophobia EUMC (2007), Islamophobia is defined as an anti-
Muslim and anti-Islamic phenomenon. However, as Erik Bleich argues,
without a concept that applies to various analogous categories such
as racism, anti-Semitism or xenophobia, it is “virtually impossible to
identify the causes and consequences of Islamophobia with any preci-

sion” (1582). Although it is not a synonymous term, “Islamophobia”
does overlap with other discriminatory stances, such as xenophobia,
anti-Semitism and racism. Given the plurality and multiplicity of inter-
pretations of Islamophobia, Sayyid and Vakil highlight the controversy
that permeates Islamophobic discourses; it is not Islam “per se which
is the target of discriminatory practices but Muslims, and as such, the
use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ prevents legitimate critique of Islamic
practices” (13). I strongly disagree with Sayyid and Vakil’s observations
in a post-9/11 context, when it is not only Muslims but also Islam
that is being targeted, particularly in terms of its concept of jihad as
propounded in the Qur’an and of Islamic Shariah Laws (such as the
Hudood Ordinance) as well as in terms of visible markers of Islamic
identity (such as wearing of Islamic attire, including the hijab and
beard). In this context, the terms “Islamophobia” and “Muslimphobia”
seem to be interlinked rather than distinct. As Nasar Meer also says:
“The increase in personal abuse and everyday racism since 9/11 and the
London bombings, in which the perceived ‘Islamic-ness’ of the victims
is the central reason for the abuse, regardless of the truth of this pre-
sumption (resulting in Sikhs and others with an ‘Arab’ appearance being
attacked for ‘looking like Bin Laden’)” suggests that racial and religious
discrimination are much more interlinked than the current application
of civil and criminal legislation allows (Meer 72). Despite its failure
historically to contextualise Islamophobia, which would have helped
to situate the phenomenon in the contexts of race and ethnicity, the
Runnymede Report is helpful insomuch as it defines it as an “unfounded
hostility towards both Islam” and Muslims and explains Islamophobia
as “a useful shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and,
therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims” (1). This is supported
by the fact accentuated in the Runnymede Report that all Muslims
have been reduced to “monist abstraction[s]” (63) through substitut-
able markers such as “Pakistani” and “Asian”. Likewise, the distinction
between “Muslims” and “Arabs” has continuously and opportunisti-
cally been blurred since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which implies the
harbouring of racist sentiments towards Muslims rather than merely an
antipathy towards Islam. Islam is equally viewed and framed in reduc-
tive and essentialist manners, without any acknowledgment of the
diversity within Islamic traditions across different geographical loca-
tions and regions. This gestures not only towards “the impossibility and
implausibility of Islam being ‘European’” (Allen 70) but also reinforces
and affirms Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” rhetoric
Introduction 5
that is invidiously premised on distinct cultures and civilisations, “each

based on a specific religion” (Roy, Globalised 328).
The most comprehensive definition of Islamophobia, therefore, comes
from Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, who describe it as anti-Muslim
sentiment that simultaneously “draws upon signs of race, culture and
belonging in a way that is by no means reducible to hostility towards a
religion alone, and compels us to consider how religion has a new socio-
logical relevance because of the ways it is tied up with issues of commu-
nity identity, stereotyping, socio-economic location, political conflict
and so forth” (in Sayyid and Vakil 70). According to Modood, reducing
the definition of religion to “belief that can be voluntarily renounced”
and of race as “one’s immutable biology” is equivalent to simplifying
the complex discourse of the nexus between religion and “cultural oth-
erness” (16–17). Therefore, by interlinking the concepts of racialisation,
cultural racism and religion, Meer and Modood argue that Muslim iden-
tities cannot necessarily be summed up as religious identities because
“people do not choose to be or not to be born into a Muslim family”
(in Sayyid and Vakil 82). Therefore, the nature of hatred and hostility
that the sight of a Muslim can provoke in an Islamophobe is similar to
the “racial discrimination directed at other minorities” (Modood 82).
In this respect, I tend to agree with Meer and Modood that it is impos-
sible to separate “the impact of appearing Muslim from the impact of
appearing to follow Islam” (in Sayyid and Vakil 74). Quite often, hostil-
ity towards Islam and in particular the so-called conservative tenden-
cies in Islamic traditions, such as Islamic punishments and Hudood
Laws, is used to justify discriminatory attitudes towards Muslims and
their “unresponsive [attitude] to new realities and challenges” (Allen
69). Similarly, the Islamic doctrine of jihad after 9/11 came to define
the Muslimness of all Muslims, irrespective of their religious, social or
cultural background. Such reductionism has institutionalised the fear
of Islam both as a religion and as a culture. Recognising this reductive
homogenisation of Muslim culture and faith, Allen corroborates: “such
projections draw particular attention” to the terms “fundamentalism”
and “fundamentalists” and their use “in the media as an inappropriate
marker of identification” (Allen 70). This international fear of Muslims,
I argue, has wide-ranging ontological effects, some of which are also
highlighted in the Runnymede Report: “the practical consequences of
such hostility are unfair discrimination against Muslim individuals and
communities, and the exclusion of Muslims from mainstream political
and social affairs” (2–4). The events of 11 September 2001 have not only
resulted in a re-emergence of Islamophobia as an historical anti-Muslim
and anti-Islamic phenomenon but they have also raised the urgency
of redefining Islamophobia as an ideology that continues to inform
and shape Western attitudes. Such attitudes determine and initiate
“practices [of violence and abuse] and prejudices” (Allen 169), which
the writers of Pakistani origin foreground in their novels.
My main concern here is not to interrogate conspiracy theories sur-
rounding 9/11 events, as a number of books have already been pub-
lished on that issue. I instead trace the nexus between 9/11 and the
reframing of Muslim identities at home and in the diaspora. I want to
stress here that whilst interrogating the marked phenomenon of the
reconstruction of Muslim identities against the backdrop of “war on
terror” rhetoric, I do not consider 9/11 as the only marker of changed
perceptions about Muslims and Islam. It is important to look beyond
9/11, as the title of this book suggests. Rather than confining my analy-
sis of post-9/11 Muslim identity crises to what Mahmood Mamdani calls
“Culture Talk” – grounding the post-9/11 debates of upsurge of Islamist
terrorists groups and Islamic extremism in Huntington’s “clash of civili-
sations” paradigm – I also consider 9/11 as “unfinished business of the
Cold War” (13), which suggests that “war on terror” discourse is also
born out of political encounters and economic Manichaeism. Therefore,
whilst contextualising Muslim identities in the wake of rise of Islamic
extremism, I also consider the Iranian Revolution, the Gulf Wars, the
Afghan jihad, US oil interests in the Gulf region and Afghanistan and
the Rushdie Affair as other significant markers that not only contrib-
uted to changed perceptions of Muslims in the diaspora after 9/11
but also brought to light the alliance of the US with jihadists during
the Cold War period. In so doing, rather than decontextualising and
dehistoricising the events of September 11 and subsequent changes in
perceptions about Islam and Muslims in the West, I follow Mamdani’s
lead and argue that “9/11 came out of recent history, that of the late
Cold War” (11).
With this context in mind, I examine ways in which second-
generation writers of Pakistani origin inform, criticise and construct
Pakistani Muslims abroad as well as in their culture of origin. In so
doing, I discuss second-generation fiction as a robust rebuttal of Western
fictional representations (termed “9/11 fiction” in this book) that rein-
force the dominant US public rhetoric of equating Islam with terrorism.
This book also rebuts the binarism proposed by George Bush: “Either you
are with us or you are with the terrorists” (“Transcript” CNN). Mamdani,
in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and The Roots of
Terror, warns against the core message of such a discourse, interpreting
Introduction 7
that “unless proved to be ‘good’, every Muslim was presumed to be

‘bad’” (15). Judith Butler also reminds us that the binarism that Bush
proposes “returns us to an anachronistic division between ‘East’ and
‘West’ and which, in its sloshy metonymy, returns us to the invidious
distinction between civilization (our own) and barbarism (now coded
as ‘Islam’ itself)” (Precarious 2). The authors I discuss in this monograph
take 9/11 discourses in new directions whilst recognising the need to
negotiate identities in the wake of contexts beyond 9/11. The vexed
relationship between the dominant US and the subaltern wider sub-
continent in the post-9/11 world is renegotiated in second-generation
writings by creating a third space beyond East/West cultural boundaries,
a space that Roger Bromley terms “a space of revaluation” (1). In this
monograph I discuss these second-generation novels by setting up two
main categories: a major genre of “post-9/11 fiction” and a sub-genre
that retrospectively serves as “prologues to post-9/11 fiction” (that I will
term “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction”).
Historical contextualisation of “post-9/11 fiction”
By considering the re-framing of Pakistani identities in the aftermath

of 9/11, Rethinking Identities uniquely links the resurgence of differ-
ent forms of Islam and the subsequent emergence of ethnic/sectarian/
national identities in Pakistan from the late 1970s to that of a global
ummah after 9/11. Combining writers’ fictional works, their polemical
writings and their published interviews, I contextualise and historicise
fictional representations of post-9/11 constructions of Pakistani Muslim
identities in relation to ethnic, sectarian and religious conflicts within
Pakistan and beyond. Whereas “post-9/11 fiction” focuses on post-9/11
settings so as to foreground the repercussions of the September 11 ter-
rorist attacks on the lives of Pakistanis in the diaspora and at home,
fictions that work as “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction” use
pre-9/11 settings in order to situate contemporary Pakistan in a global
context. Novels included in the latter category look at political deci-
sions and social factors in Pakistan from the late 1970s onwards that
have contributed towards Pakistan’s image as a terrorist land, particu-
larly after 9/11. I consider Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God in
Chapter 2, Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses and Kartography in Chapter 3,
and Nadeem Aslam’s Season of the Rainbirds in Chapter 4, all of which
use pre-9/11 settings in order to link national, regional and global polit-
ical scenarios and thereby to contextualise contemporary encounters
between the West and Muslims/Islam. The Islamisation phenomenon,
which was inaugurated by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but then strengthened

by Zia-ul-Haq in the late 1970s, continues to have a significant social,
cultural and political momentum in two ways.
Firstly, Zia’s support for the Afghan jihad – which was informed by the
dominant paradigm of Islamic solidarity and by an affiliation with the
Muslim ummah – resonates with his Islamisation policy in the 1970s and
1980s. By supporting the US-funded Afghan jihad against the Soviets,
Zia revived a concept of militant jihad that was “dormant in most of
the Muslim world” (Kramatschek n.p.). After the Soviets’ withdrawal
from Afghanistan, the US changed its policy towards these holy warriors
from pro-Taliban to anti-Taliban; as a result, Pakistan has been exposed
to multifarious external and internal security challenges. For example,
the US-funded madrassas (Islamic seminaries) opened in Pakistan dur-
ing Zia’s regime for the training of mujahideen have remained a target
for the US army since the Soviet-Afghan War, as some radicals trained in
these madrassas have morphed into al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups
that are currently confronting the West. In addition, Zia’s support of
Afghan mujahideen is mainly responsible for the multi-faceted violence
that has regularly roiled Karachi and North Pakistan; drone attacks in
Northwest Pakistan since 2004 and on-going Operation Zarb-e-Azb
(2014), the most comprehensive operation against the local and foreign
terrorists hiding in sanctuaries in North Waziristan, are the most recent
examples of such crisis.
Secondly, Zia’s Islamisation divided the whole Pakistani nation along
ethnic, sectarian and religious grounds: Shia–Sunni, muhajir–local and
Sindhi–Punjabi sectarian and ethnic conflicts, as well as the influx of
Afghan immigrants, are the outcome of the same Islamisation policy
(discussed in detail in Chapter 3). By linking ethnic rivalries within
Pakistan and the wider subcontinent with the Islamisation of Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Middle Eastern countries, I discuss how intra-Muslim
sectarian violence has been manipulated by the US during the Soviet–
Afghan and Gulf Wars. The rise of various Islamic movements and
fundamentalist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East
resulted in US interference in Muslim countries. This, in turn, provided
a rationale for transnational jihadist movements to respond in radical
ways. The 9/11 attacks then provided the US with an alibi to accelerate
global political games, by propagating “war on terror” propaganda that
resulted in the rise of Islamophobia within the West. My use of the term
“propaganda” particularly refers to the US state propaganda that, accord-
ing to Noam Chomsky, creates “a slogan that nobody’s to be against, and
everybody’s going to be for” (Media 26). Using words such as “homeland
Introduction 9
security”, “harmony” and “Americanism”, the US state propaganda in

the aftermath of 9/11 not only controlled “the public mind” (Media
13) but also permitted no deviation from it. It is important to stress
that I do not position Pakistan merely as a victim whose problems are
all imposed from the outside; by highlighting intra-Muslim sectarian
violence and the rise of various Islamic movements and fundamentalist
groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East, this book identi-
fies the nexus between “homegrown” terrorist activities and a post-9/11
image of Pakistan in the West. In fact the novels discussed in the cat-
egory “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction” address this urgent
need to engage with the indigenous social and political scenarios as well
as with US intervention in the internal affairs of other countries (par-
ticularly Afghanistan and Iraq), illuminating ways in which the local
and global mutually inform each other. My reading of these second-
generation writings suggests that this local–global nexus has prepared
the ground for current perceptions of radicalised Islam in the West (my
focus is particularly on the US and Britain).
After 9/11: Contextualising the home–diaspora nexus
While the foregoing provides significant contextualisation to my discus-

sion, I am particularly interested in considering a home–diaspora nexus
and foregrounding ways in which changed societal perceptions about
Muslims in the West inform subjects’ identities and affiliations. In recent
decades, Pakistani diasporics have been – and continue to be – compelled
to rethink/renegotiate their identities in increasingly flexible ways. One
of the ways they do so is to affiliate with a more flexible notion of the
global ummah, a shift that Amin Malak also calls for in contemporary
postcolonial discourses. Islam has emerged as a key conceptual cat-
egory among second-generation Pakistani Muslims in the US and the
UK, as they (re)construct their identities in the aftermath of 9/11. It is
important not to homogenise the complexities of faith-based identi-
ties in the diaspora. Recognising the multiple articulations of Muslim
identity, Malak notes: “Despite fierce schisms from within and ferocious
assaults from without, Islam, both as a faith and civilization, has, in
aggregate, acquired a global, cross-cultural reach that embraces diversi-
ties of languages, races, ethnicities, and religions” (5). Malak provides
an insight into a self-actualising identity-defining process that I would
define as “Muslim” and differentiate from “Islamic”. Whereas the term
“Islamic” refers to thoughts, rituals and institutions sanctioned by Islam,
“Muslim” refers to someone who is not only rooted formatively and
emotionally in the culture and civilisation of Islam but is also, I argue,

actively engaged in negotiating what that rooting means. In a similar
vein, Robin Richardson warns against blurring the distinction between
“belief” and “affiliation”; the term “Muslim”, according to him, gestures
towards one’s affiliation to the Muslim cultural heritage rather than
religious faith (Petley and Richardson 10).
Accentuating the “transient and uncertain nature of [Muslim] identi-
ties” in terms of political, ethnic or geographical references, Olivier Roy
too asks: “Should the term Muslim refer to a self-declared believer or to
anybody with a familial background linked with a Muslim society? …
Are there atheist Muslims?” (Globalised Islam 102). I find synthesis
between Malak’s and Roy’s definitions. For me, the term “Muslim” fea-
tures both its purely religious and its cultural dimensions, in contrast to
the term “Islamist” which I use here in reference to any form of political
Islam. It is also in this context that writers such as Rushdie, Aslam and
Kureishi are discussed as Muslim writers in this book. Nevertheless, to be
more specific with regard to religious and cultural dimensions, I use the
terms “practising-Muslims” and “non-practising Muslims” respectively.
These interpretative paradigms for identitarian choices or one’s affilia-
tion with either Islam or Muslim culture, as suggested by Malak and Roy,
become more important when, in the light of Islamophobic narratives,
Muslims (or in my context, Pakistanis) are imagined as a homogenised
community of followers of a monolithic Islam. It is in this context that
second-generation writers of Pakistani origin focus predominantly on the
resurgence of different forms of Islam within Pakistan and the diaspora.
The home–diaspora nexus is brought to the fore by second-generation
writers through their characters’ (dis)affiliation with the conservative
tendencies in Islamic traditions, as well as with the ancestral home
that makes them strangers not only in the Western community, but
also within their own communities. Homi Bhabha, Sara Ahmed and
Avtar Brah’s paradigms of “otherness” are useful in exploring the ways
in which Pakistani Muslim characters experience estrangement in both
individual and collective contexts. Competing definitions of Islam and
ancestral home serve as the basis for inter- and intra-cultural conflicts
in diasporic contexts. Whether in relation to a clash between first- and
second-generation Pakistani communities in the West, or the clash
between Muslim and Western communities, Islamic extremism remains
a dominant factor. By presenting a critique of their characters’ affili-
ations to reductive (Islamic) nationalisms, Shamsie and Aslam, most
notably, challenge the purported “clash of civilisations” (Huntington 1)
in their novels and disrupt essentialisms about place and cultures.
Introduction 11
Given this context, the idea about “homeland orientation” (temporal,

geographical and spatial) as the main “constitutive criteria” (Brubaker
1–19) of diaspora is particularly valuable in understanding how second-
generation writings either emphasise or de-emphasise characters’ desires
of returning to their homeland in the aftermath of 9/11. Brubaker iden-
tifies three core constitutive elements in almost all of the definitions
given by theorists of diaspora: dispersion in space, orientation to a
homeland, and boundary-maintenance (Brubaker 5). I emphasise the
second element in my reading of second-generation writings primarily
because it encompasses a wider notion of homeland as both real and
imaginary, geographical and spatial. Secondly, definitions based on
homeland orientation can be discussed either in terms of emphasis-
ing or de-emphasising myths of return. Finally, such theories also take
into consideration the first and third elements: dispersion in space
and boundary-maintenance. Therefore, my use of the term “homeland
orientation” is not restricted to a desire to return home; I consider dif-
ferent possibilities of subjects’ affiliations with the idea of home, which
can be described as spatial and nostalgic rather than geographic.
Whereas William Safran’s definition of diaspora perpetuates a more
“centered model” based on the return to a homeland, James Clifford
emphasises “de-centered, lateral connections” with an ancestral home-
land. In this respect, Clifford advocates a more flexible position on the
issue of diaspora. Therefore, Clifford’s definition of diasporic subjects as
“bearers of discrepant temporalities … that trouble the linear, progressive
narratives of the nation-state and global modernization” will form the
basis of my enquiry into the home-diaspora nexus (317). As Sara Ahmed
says, we “inhabit spaces that extend our skin” (Queer Phenomenology 10),
demonstrating the fluidity of borders between “homeland” and diaspora
“homes” and challenging “territory determined concepts of culture”
(Zhang 132). Living beyond geographically or spatially fixed locations,
immigrants extend “their bodies into spaces that create new folds,
or new contours of what we would call livable or inhabitable space”
(Ahmed et al. Uprootings 11). Such mobile identities, which subvert the
notion of linear migration that involve choosing between “roots” and
“routes”, make it possible to expand and reconstruct identities via what
one might describe as “rerouting roots”.
In the light of these paradigms, I discuss the idea of home and
(re)constructions of individual and collective Pakistani Muslim identi-
ties, particularly in the work of Aslam and Shamsie. I consider the way
characters’ desire for homeland versus homing desire informs their
national, transnational or postnational identities. Esra Mirze Santesso
uses the term “disorientation” to describe the identity crises of Muslim

immigrants in the West, saying: “At the core of disorientation lies the
ability to hold ambiguous loyalties, which contest, but at the same time,
constitute each other. With that in mind, disorientation can be creative
engagement with new-found agency or a reactive response to severe
alienation” (20). With this context in mind, I interrogate the effects of
border crossing on Muslim migrant characters in Shamsie’s and Aslam’s
novels. Shamsie’s early novels foreground a strong affiliation with home-
land, which is emphasised through the means of two strategies. Firstly,
second-generation Pakistanis in her novels prefer re-routing to re-rooting
as a result of experiencing sectarian conflicts, as I will explain further
with reference to Kartography. Secondly, Pakistani diasporics retain strong
connections with their culture of origin, even in the diaspora. This is
shown by neutralising or downplaying the importance of Western space,
or, more specifically, by creating what Rehana Ahmed terms an abstrac-
tion of the space of Britain (“Unsettling Cosmopolitanisms” 12–28), as
exemplified in Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron and Kartography and in Aslam’s
Maps for Lost Lovers. It is important to note that this abstraction of
Western space by characters aims to reposition the West as marginal and
the non-West as central in the midst of what is perceived as the xenopho-
bic or Islamophobic imaginary of white-majority populations abroad.
More generally, by combining the pre- and post-9/11 settings within
Pakistan and the diaspora in this monograph, my objective has been
to highlight ways in which stigmatisation on the basis of ethnicity
has morphed into stigmatisation on the basis of faith, meaning that
xenophobia has taken the form of Islamophobia. Both Shamsie and
Aslam highlight this shift in their novels that were written in the after-
math of 9/11 (Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil
and The Blind Man’s Garden). My reading of these texts suggests that
second-generation writers – through their characters’ postnational and
non-territorial affiliation with a global ummah – not only challenge the
articulation of new orthodoxies towards Islam and Muslims in Western
public discourses, but also challenge the East–West binarism.
Pakistani fiction that uses pre-9/11 settings offers a compelling critique
of reductive nationalisms among Pakistanis. Sectarian and ethnic con-
flicts in 1980s Karachi – which have their roots in both the 1947 Partition
and the 1971 Partition – divided the first generation on the basis of
limited territory-determined concepts of culture and identity, such as
differences in ethnicity, caste, ancestry and language. The first genera-
tion’s pathological attachment with the past and a reductive nationalism
gesture towards what Eng and Kazanjian term “an inexorable fixity” (2),
Introduction 13
which is subsequently challenged by the second generation who move to

a more inclusive view of life through a rebuttal of the monolithic Islam
promoted by Zia. Both of these tendencies – conservative nationalism
and monolithic definitions of Islam – have also contributed towards
negative images of Islam and Muslims in the West.
With these numerous interlinking contexts in mind, I am particularly
interested in what stories the second-generation writers of Pakistani
origin choose to tell about Pakistan and diasporic Pakistanis, how these
stories are crafted, and what effect these stories have on different audi-
ences. The novels that I analyse here share a common focus on home
and identity while historically contextualising domestic themes and
issues in relation to a global setting. In terms of identity discourses,
there is a gradual transition from national to transnational identity
and from transnational to postnational identity. Similarly, in terms of
aesthetic representations of geo-political situations, I move from Khan’s
portrayal of the pre-9/11 national scenario to Shamsie’s and Aslam’s
portrayals of the post-9/11 situation. The thematic and chronological
structure of my book facilitates a consideration of the various roles
played by these writers as they: (a) arguably seek to define or speak
for a community (as Shamsie asserts, “[t]he political or historical is
embedded in the very character” [Siddiqui n.p.]); (b) dismantle negative
stereotypes of Muslims and Islam in the West.
Though my main focus is on fictional rather than media represen-
tations of Muslims, I occasionally refer to the (mis)representation of
Muslims in mainstream UK and US media in the aftermath of 9/11 in
order to contextualise my discussion on Islamophobia. Whilst I do not
intend to homogenise all Western/US media, the bias and power of
mainstream UK and US media cannot be underestimated. A number of
books published on this topic testify to my argument regarding main-
stream Western media representations. For example, Noam Chomsky,
one of America’s foremost social critics, and Andre Vitchek, filmmaker
and investigative journalist, in their book On Western Terrorism: From
Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, are overtly critical about the BBC’s censor-
ship policy, which according to them is not “exactly censorship, but
prevents anything from being said” (32), thereby, “desensitizing people
to the point that while they still see, periodically, the reality around
them, when they compare it to the virtual reality with which they are
bombarded day and night, like some horrible insects destroying their
country, or half of California falling off the cliff, of course all these
things that they are facing in real life appear to be banal and really
not too important” (54). I similarly assert that Pakistan has emerged
as a leading locus of terrorism in the world, partly as a result of media

propaganda that imparts partial information to the public. By contrast,
Chomsky and Vitchek have observed a “tremendous discipline in cover-
ing the events”, that include reports on Afghanistan, Iran, China, the
West Bank, Gujarat massacres and 9/11 events, by other world media,
such as Turkey, China and Iran.
Highlighting the self-censorship in post-9/11 world journalism, Sara J.
Ahmed’s Evaluating the Framing of Islam and Muslims Pre- and Post-9/11:
A Contextual Analysis of Articles Published by the New York Times also pro-
vides an insight into how the current media conglomerates – through
the use of “selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration”, of “military
triumphalist language” and self-censorship – tend to frame images of
Muslims and Islam in ways that indicate the fact that “disinformation
was being delivered from the highest levels of government” (3, 9, 13).
Based on her research about the use of the terms “Muslim” and “Islam”
in pre- and post-9/11 articles published by the New York Times, Ahmed
argues that “the repeated employment of violent frames found in
the post-9/11 Islam data set indicate that media content proactively
implements bias to unsuspecting recipients” (32). Similarly, in Media
Representations of British Muslims: Reporting Islam, Elizabeth Poole
observes that “the conservative coverage in the reporting of British
Islam” (248) perpetuates the idea that “Islam is static and that Muslims
are resistant to progress”; this suggests that media coverage is “heavily
coloured … by Western/US foreign policy dictates” (25). As a result of
the non-availability of alternative information to non-Muslims, selec-
tive media coverage contributes to the “perpetuation and maintenance
of a range of dominant ideologies on the issue” (250).
Julian Petley and Robin Richardson’s Pointing the Finger: Islam and
Muslims in the British Media is a useful resource not only in foreground-
ing journalistic strategies of “decontextualisation, misinformation and
a preferred discourse of threat, fear and danger” in the “UK national
press” (xvi) that tends to contribute to an Islamophobic environment
but also in showing how such coverage turns out to be a “major barrier
preventing the success of the government’s integration and community
cohesion policies and programmes” (251). The point that needs con-
sideration is why only one kind of news dominates media and journal-
ism? Almeena Ahmed, a British-Pakistani working for BBC London, also
expresses her concern over this impartiality and unbalanced reportage:
“natural disasters, political corruption and terrorism are the three top
stories that come from Pakistan today” (Express n.p.). Likewise, although
Maha Khan Phillips, a freelance journalist and novelist from Pakistan
Introduction 15
currently residing in London, is extremely critical of “rampant cor-

ruption, deeply entrenched feudalism, tribalism, ethnic division, and
even cultural legacy” within Pakistan that are “mainly responsible for
women’s degraded position [there]”, she is equally apprehensive about
“Muslim memory memoirs” because this “kind of narrative does not
help women in my country” (“La Femme” n.p.). Therefore, my claim
that post-9/11 Islamophobic sentiments spring from media representa-
tions is broadly informed by such observations. These are all the issues
which I address in the course of this monograph.
Chapter outline
Chapter 1 surveys a new wave of second-generation writers of Pakistani

origin, whilst laying out the background to their writings through a
discussion of narratives by first-generation writers of Pakistani origin.
In the first half, the main focus remains on the fictional narratives
concerned with the 1947 Partition and its aftermath, as well as post-
independence narratives written in the 1980s. I illustrate a shift in the-
matic foci from Pakistani writers writing around the time of Partition
to those dealing with the problems of post-independence Pakistan,
with a particular focus on the Islamisation of the country during Zia’s
regime. The post-9/11 situation in Pakistan owes a great deal to Zia’s
Islamisation policies, which resulted in the rise of Islamic extremism
and jihadist culture in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The first half also con-
textualises the output of second-generation writers by referring to the
“Rushdie Affair”, which served as a catalyst for “clash of civilisation”
rhetoric and the emergence of new Muslim identities in Britain.
In the second half of Chapter 1, I concentrate on second-generation
writers of Pakistani origin – Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, H.M.
Naqvi, Ali Sethi, Maha Khan Phillips and Feryal Gauhar– who fore-
ground connections between the post-9/11 situation of Pakistan and
the Islamic reforms during the era of Zia’s military dictatorship, as well
as the rise of Islamophobia discourses in the West. In so doing, these
writers expand the horizon of their fictional canvases to include the
Muslim communities in the US and the UK, in order to foreground
Islam’s troubled relationship with the West after 9/11.
Chapter 2 focuses on Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God and
Trespassing, engaging at a narrative level with her interpretation of
issues of Muslim stereotyping and “war on terror” rhetoric. Khan links
these issues to sectarian conflicts within the subcontinent and the
Islamic reforms in Pakistan since the 1970s. In so doing, these texts
foreground cultural, political and historical causes that underlie recent

global stereotyping against Muslims. This chapter centres on Khan’s
representations of South Asian political history of the 1970s and 1980s,
primarily in her fictional works, but also in some of her polemical writ-
ing. The first part of the chapter focuses on Khan’s portrayal of ways in
which Zia’s Islamic resurgence not only divided the nation along ethnic
and religious lines, thereby promoting a culture of intolerance towards
various ethno-national minorities, but also revived the concept of
militant jihad. Khan posits a nexus between the Islamisation of Pakistan
in the 1970s and 1980s, crises in the Gulf region due to the First and
Second Gulf Wars, and the growth of the hard-line Islamic movement of
the Taliban in Afghanistan, whilst flagging up the repercussions of the
9/11 attacks for Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Gulf countries. There
is no denying that US interference in internal Arab affairs and heavy
militarisation of the Gulf region furthered the jihadist movement of
al-Qaeda. Most importantly, as a result of its involvement in both wars
either directly or indirectly, Pakistan has emerged as a leading locus of
terrorism in the world.
What is particularly distinctive about Khan’s fiction is her representa-
tion of female Pakistani characters. Khan’s gendered focus has the effect
of critiquing Pakistan’s patriarchal society whilst simultaneously por-
traying Pakistan as a land of opportunities for women of all classes pro-
vided they are willing to stand up for their rights. It also deconstructs
the reductive tropes of burqa-clad Muslim women that have been used
by the US to justify the “war on terror”. The homeland–diaspora con-
nection in Khan’s novels is also significant, as she accentuates the ways
in which the lives of Pakistani diasporics in their respective diasporas
are informed by social and political scenarios within their homeland.
Chapter 3 charts the transition from national to diasporic or trans-
national contexts. This chapter deals with Kamila Shamsie’s notion of
homeland, emphasising the spatial configuration of home rather than
location. As a writer who moves between homeland and diaspora,
Shamsie is interested in her characters’ experiences of dislocation and
relocation and their possible effects on her characters’ identities in a
post-9/11 world. Therefore, she engages with issues related to identity
and home that began to change in the aftermath of 9/11. The chapter
looks at how Shamsie’s characters cope with their hyphenated identities,
on the one hand, and their Muslim identities on the other. Her novels
also historically contextualise this changing relationship between
home, identity and “war on terror” through a focus on the historical
and political scenario of Pakistan in the late 1970s as well as during the
Introduction 17
1947 and 1971 Partitions. I suggest that the rise of religious extremism
during Zia’s era, in conjunction with his support of Afghan mujahideen,
partly contributes to hostile attitudes towards Islam in the West. Bearing
in mind this historical context, my aim is to highlight the wide range of
experiences and dilemmas that Shamsie’s migrant characters exemplify,
their struggle with hyphenated identities, and the sometimes xenopho-
bic imaginings of the white population abroad. Shamsie’s oeuvre sug-
gests a strange amalgam of nationalist and cosmopolitan philosophies.
Rather than advocating “territory determined concepts of culture”
(Zhang 132), Shamsie’s latest novel is a plea to deterritorialise borders
and to rethink notions of homeland and belonging, complicating the
relationship between routes and roots.
In Chapter 4, I argue that the post-9/11 political climate plays a
significant role in redefining diasporic Muslim identities by highlight-
ing a transition from transnational to postnational identities. Given
the nature of emerging public narratives about the “war on terror”,
second-generation diasporics in Britain – alienated from their cultures
of origin yet proud of their Muslim identities – are renegotiating
their identities by affiliating with a global ummah. On the one hand,
Aslam’s novels highlight reasons for the emergence of a postnational
identity by deconstructing cultural stereotypes and clichés inherent in
Western Orientalist discourses. On the other hand, the novels show
how hyphenated selves also suffer the scourge of communal tensions.
Accentuating the religious fervour of his characters, Aslam drama-
tises the potential clash between secular and Islamic approaches with
regards to first- and second-generation immigrants, as well as between
East and West. This clash marks a paradigm shift from an Orientalist
epistemology to a terrorist ontology.
1
How the World Changed:
Narratives of Nationhood and
Displaced Muslim Identities
Whilst reflecting upon the diversity of Muslim writings in English in

the conclusion of his book Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English,
Amin Malak notes that “with no defining or definitive influences as
yet interlinking the majority of them, they thus reflect the specificity
of each writer’s sociohistorical milieu, intellectual progress, and artis-
tic development … to an engagement with the world and the values
of Islam” (151). This chapter also seeks to address first- and second-
generation Pakistani writers’ intellectual and artistic engagement with
the representation of Islam and Muslims in pre- and post-9/11 contexts.
This was also necessary because “post-9/11 (Pakistani) fiction” has been
seen as a de-historicised phenomenon; and what I have wanted to do
is to contextualise the so-called boom in Pakistani post-9/11 fiction in
relation to a rich literary tradition that has developed over more than
three decades. By that I mean the first-generation fictional narratives
concerned with the 1947 Partition and its aftermath as well as post-
independence narratives written in the 1980s, with a particular focus
on the Islamic reassertion during Zia-ul-Haq’s administration. This era
is also foregrounded by many second-generation writers in their fic-
tional works as a turning point in the political history of Pakistan. The
post-9/11 situation of Pakistan indeed owes a great deal to Zia’s foreign
policies and his ruthless Islamisation of the country, influencing the rise
of Islamic extremism and jihadist culture in Pakistan and Afghanistan
(discussed in Chapters 2 and 3).
In the wake of this historical contextualisation, the section entitled
“Rewriting Holy Terror” shifts the focus to post-9/11 contexts and sur-
veys second-generation writers of Pakistani origin – Mohsin Hamid,
Mohammed Hanif, Ali Sethi, H.M. Naqvi, Maha Khan Phillips and
Feryal Gauhar– who can be grouped together because they construct a
18
How the World Changed 19
new category of Pakistani fiction in English on the basis of two main

factors. Firstly, they foreground connections between the post-9/11
situation of Pakistan and Islamic reforms during the era of Zia’s military
dictatorship. Secondly, these writers, whilst taking 9/11 discourse in
new directions, represent historical and political connections between
Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East in the context of both the rise
of religious extremism in these countries and the rise of Islamophobia
discourses in the West. In so doing, these writers expand the horizon
of their fictional canvas to include both Pakistan and Muslim com-
munities in the US and the UK, in order to represent Islam’s troubled
relationship with the West in the post-9/11 world. Attention to these
connections is particularly important given the ways in which Western
public narratives tend to conflate Muslim and Arab identities in the
way that they have with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Partly as a result
of this conflation, Pakistani diasporic communities in the West have
continued to be the target of US counter-terrorism activities since 9/11;
this situation (along with other factors that I will explain) contributed
to the post-9/11 political formation of the global ummah or faith-based
Muslim identities.
One particular characteristic of Pakistani second-generation fiction
is the way in which it critically engages sacred and legal texts includ-
ing Qur’anic/Hadith references to war and jihad, as well as Islamic
jurisprudence and shariat laws, such as the Hudood Ordinance and
the Blasphemy Law. I argue that what makes second-generation texts
distinct in dealing with these sacred and legal texts is the manner in
which they foreground ways that the same references have been used
in the West after 9/11 to Orientalise Islam and portray it as a religion
of violence and militant jihad. At the same time, these writers are also
very critical of state manipulation of the conservative tendencies within
Islam, particularly as regards the ways it affects women.1 This has argu-
ably contributed towards the stereotyping of Muslims as intolerant and
extremist by the West.
Because my book centres on texts written quite consciously from the
position of the second generation, I discuss these second-generation
novels by grouping them into two main categories: a major genre
of “post-9/11 fiction” and a sub-genre of “retrospective prologues to
post-9/11 fiction”. The term “9/11 fiction” has recently emerged as a
category that includes both novels that reinforce the US public rhetoric
equating Islam with terrorism (such as John Updike’s The Terrorist, 2006;
and Don De Lillo’s Falling Man, 2007) and those that highlight the lives
of Muslims affected by the 9/11 events. In this book, I distinguish the
latter under the rubric of “post-9/11 fiction” (examples include Hamid’s

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Naqvi’s Homeboy and Aslam’s The Wasted
Vigil). These novels provide a postcolonial gaze on the dominant “clash
of civilisations” rhetoric.2
In order to provide historical contextualisation for “post-9/11 fic-
tion”, I formulate an additional category by grouping together those
novels that serve as “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction”.
Novels included in this category look at the political decisions and
social factors in Pakistan from the late 1970s that have arguably con-
tributed towards Pakistan’s image as a terrorist land, particularly after
9/11. By this I mean novels such as Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes,
Shamsie’s Broken Verses, Khan’s The Geometry of God and Aslam’s Season
of the Rainbirds, which accentuate the emergence of Islamic extrem-
ism in the region. I suggest that these two categories together provide
literary-critical paradigms for redressing 9/11 Islamophobic fiction.
In addition to this, these categories raise important concerns about
Islamophobia as an ideology that continues to shape Western attitudes,
or what Edward Said (borrowing the term from Thomas Frank and
Edward Weisband), in Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts
Determine How We See the Rest of the World, calls the effects of “word
politics” since 9/11 (1981 xvi). My intention is to illuminate the ways
in which a spectrum of locations – local, regional and global; national,
transnational and international – is foregrounded in these novels as
mutually informative in the construction of post-9/11 Muslim identi-
ties. In so doing, both “post-9/11 fiction” and “retrospective prologues
to post-9/11 fiction” are shown to contribute to the nation’s long and
rich literary tradition by setting up new paradigms and categories for
“New Pakistani Literature in English” in the last two decades. My aim,
more broadly, is therefore to re-position writers of Pakistani origin from
the margins to the centre.
Narrating history: Partition and post-independence

narratives
While talking to Alok Bhalla on the issue of Partition, Intizar Husain

has said: “When my critics object and tell me that I am obsessed by
the experience of the Partition, I am trapped in it, my response is that
what happened in 1947 was so complex, so devastating, that I have
yet to understand it fully. How can I get away from it?” (107). Husain’s
comment not only gestures towards the significance of the catastrophic
legacy of Partition in Pakistan’s political history but also underscores
its central role in the making of Pakistani identities in the wake of

apparently irreconcilable differences that have continued to exist since
1947. Of course, the troubles and challenges that Pakistan faces today
cannot be understood in entirety without re-imagining the historical
moment of Partition and its aftermaths. In this section I specifically
address the dual focus of first-generation fictional narratives of Pakistani
origin and the way that these narratives contextualise the fictional
output of second-generation writers. In any case, my privileging of
second-generation writers and the texts under consideration in this
monograph on the basis of the above criteria does not undermine the
significance of first-generation writers of Pakistani origin such as Sara
Suleri, Bapsi Sidhwa, Abdullah Hussein and Zulfikar Ghose, whose work
falls outside the scope of this book. Given the overall focus of my study,
first-generation writers are only partly relevant here. For this reason, my
discussion of the texts included in this section will be confined to select
issues, for the purpose of highlighting a specific shift in thematic foci
that comes with the second generation. The main purpose of discussing
these texts is to emphasise the way the Islamisation reforms in Pakistan
in the late 1970s provide a significant historical context for first- and
second-generation Pakistani writing in English. This is also important
for my exploration of a home–diaspora nexus in terms of the ways in
which indigenous contexts and national history can affect diasporic
communities. Whilst second-generation writers are concerned with
critically locating Pakistan in the contemporary geo-political scenario,
first-generation writers tend to focus either on the tragic aftermath of
the Indo-Pak Partition and post-independence social realities or on
problems of assimilation encountered by first-generation immigrants in
the US or the UK.
Partition novels: narrating traumas
For many writers who witnessed it, the 1947 Partition of India and
Pakistan is the greatest trauma, from which the people of the subcon-
tinent have failed to recover. On-going ethnic and sectarian conflicts
in Karachi and Punjab bear witness to this trauma, a theme I address
in Chapters 2 and 3. Given this context, the oeuvres of first-generation
Pakistani writers focus predominantly on the 1947 Partition and its
aftermaths. Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988), Abdullah Hussein’s
The Weary Generations (1999), short stories by Saadat Hassan Manto
and the poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz all attempt to give an insight into
the mayhem of the Partition and the subsequent large-scale sectarian
violence. Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride (1990) and The Crow Eaters (1978)
serve as a prologue to the Partition in dealing with communal tensions
and political games in pre-Partition India, which resulted in the bloody
massacres that erupted at the time of the Partition. Ice-Candy-Man
(1988), later published as Cracking India (1991), is arguably the most
significant of the Partition novels.
Written by a Parsi writer and focalised through a child narrator,
Lenny, Ice-Candy-Man provides a non-dominant Parsi perspective on
the Indo-Pak Partition that differs from Sidhwa’s Indian or Pakistani
counterparts writing from Hindu, Sikh or Muslim perspectives. Readers
are made to imbibe the violence that ravaged the subcontinent but
they are never oblivious to Lenny’s childlike innocence, which serves
a dual purpose in the novel. On the one hand, Lenny, as a child nar-
rator, is presented as being oblivious to racial hatred and adult politics
and, therefore, she can be seen as an objective and truthful witness of
historical facts. On the other hand, the “child’s anxious naiveté” blurs
the distinction between “memory and fictive (re)creation” as well as
between private and public/national experiences (Hai 379–426). In so
doing, Sidhwa tends to “put into question the authority of any act of
writing by locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an
ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either
single origin or simple causality” (Hutcheon 12).
Lenny’s consciousness of the horror and pity hovering over the city
of Lahore is also informed by the story of what happens to her beloved
Ayah, who becomes a representative for millions of displaced Hindus
and Muslims during one of the harshest political phases in the history
of the subcontinent. Lenny and Ayah together lend “a double feminist
lens” (Hai 383) in voicing and representing the experiences of women
during the 1947 Partition. It is important, however, to consider that
Ayah has no voice of her own in the novel; her story is told by Lenny.
The only part of Ayah’s story that is not narrated in Lenny’s voice
is her rape. Ayah’s rape remains untold in the novel. This interplay
between what is shown and what is told in the novel is significant for
understanding the violence done to female bodies. Women’s bodies
were raped and mutilated as if they provided a “space over which the
competitive games of men were played out” (Kabir, “Gender, Memory,
Trauma” 179). In the novel, a train from Gurdaspur brings the dead
bodies of Muslims, but there “are no young women among the dead!
Only two gunny-bags full of women’s breasts!”(Sidhwa 149). Ayah, too,
is shown to be the “sexual and political victim [of] the antagonisms
between Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu men” (Hai 390). Lenny says: “It is
sudden. One day everybody is themselves – and the next day they are
Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols.
Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah – she is also a token.
A Hindu” (Sidhwa 101). Once identified as a token of Hinduism, she
is not only gang-raped but is also forced into prostitution by her own
Muslim admirer, Ice-Candy man. Through those few words that the
Ayah speaks to Godmother, her rescuer, in order to request her to save
her from Ice-Candy Man, Ayah becomes a “silent representative of
female violation in the text” (Hai 400).
Some of the second-generation writers such as Shamsie, in Kartography
and Salt and Saffron, also engage with the 1947 (and later 1971) Partition
experiences of the first generation that have not only left unforgettable
marks on the memories of the people of the subcontinent, but have also
transferred to the next generations, who bear the consequences of the
1947 Partition in the form of ethnic and sectarian rivalries in the coun-
try that I discuss in detail in Chapter 2. Therefore, literary production
concerned with the 1947 Partition and its aftermath remains significant
in re-evaluating the political history of Pakistan.
Post-independence novels: narrating nationhood
Despite being of the same generation, writers such as Sara Suleri and
Salman Rushdie, writing at a later date, offer a different perspective on
national history from other first-generation writers discussed above.
Rushdie and Suleri are concerned not so much with representing
the cataclysmic event of the Partition as they are with exploring the
problems of the newly established Islamic state of Pakistan.3 They
also highlight identity crises that have emerged as a result of massive
migrations of a first wave of Pakistanis to the UK and the US. In this
context, Rushdie’s Shame (1983) and Suleri’s Meatless Days (1989) are
quintessential examples of this dual focus on the identity problems
of first-generation immigrant communities and the problems of post-
independence Pakistan.
Both Rushdie and Suleri have experienced a double displacement
and identity crises subsequently resonate through their works. As a
migrant, Rushdie’s narrator in Shame has “floated upwards from his-
tory, from memory, from Time” (87). Having nothing substantial
enough to grip, Suleri’s narrator in Meatless Days also recalls Pakistan
as an intangible space and yearns for the “absolute need for steady
location” (79). This sense of displacement from roots is accentuated in
both novels in the form of what Rushdie describes in Shame as loss of
“the force of gravity”, forming a distorted and fragmented “palimpsest

on the past” (85). Both writers envisage history as “fragmented” and,
therefore, their narrators feel they are floating in the realm of un-
belonging. Rushdie’s self-conscious narrator describes “Pakistan [as] the
peeling fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself … [and]
a failure of the dreaming mind” (87), while Suleri’s narrator claims that
the country has “grown absentminded, and patches of amnesia hung
over the hollows of the land like a fog’” (18). The narrator’s own rela-
tionship with history and the motherland is ambivalent and eccentric
partly because of her Welsh mother Mairi, whose “awareness of national
identity is reinforced by the people of Pakistan who look at her with
‘centuries’ worth of mistrust of Englishwomen” (Scanlon, 411–425).
This ambivalence with regard to nationhood, history and her “real
motherland” makes the narrator in Meatless Days describe herself as “an
otherness machine” (105). It is because of this fragmented view of his-
tory that the self-reflexive narrators in Shame and Meatless Days become
emblematic of the identity struggles of dual immigrants; their lives are
shaped by personal and national tragic histories.
A critique of Pakistan’s national history is another major focus in
Shame and Meatless Days. Both Rushdie and Suleri express extreme
disillusionment with the manipulation of Islam and democracy by
political leaders in the 1980s. Rushdie fictionalises a series of vio-
lent political events such as the execution of former Pakistani prime
minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bangladesh’s secession and the forced
Islamisation of Pakistani society under General Zia’s regime. Making
“shame” a central metaphor in the novel, Rushdie represents a dictator,
corrupt politicians, civil servants and a backward “mullah-dominated”
Islamic society that have shamelessly “espouse[d] the rhetoric of faith”
(251) and legitimised censorship, violence and “barbaric” Islamic
punishments for political ends (245).
The central characters in Shame, Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder,
are fictional equivalents of the real-world leaders Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
and Zia-ul-Haq and represent the clash between intellectual modern-
ism and Islamic nationalism respectively propagated by these leaders
during the late 1970s in Pakistan. Harappa, who is depicted as a demo-
crat, promotes socialism, science and modern thought while Hyder, a
militant with a strong belief in Islamic tradition, turns his back on any-
thing that is not part of a particular kind of Islamic nationalism, which
Rushdie terms “Islamic fundamentalism” (251) in the novel. Rushdie,
like many Pakistani fiction writers, also criticises Bhutto’s execution and
the establishment of a military dictatorship after Zia’s coup.
Another feature that links Rushdie’s novel to Suleri’s is the nexus

of history and womanhood. Whereas Suleri’s feminist standpoint is
accentuated in her autobiography by showing the interface between her
familial and national tragedies (as I will discuss), Rushdie’s gender focus
is evident through his critique of the misogyny within Pakistan’s patri-
archal society. Both novelists juxtapose national history with violence
done to women’s bodies within domestic spaces in the name of sharam
(shame). Observing his feminist intervention in Shame, Suleri argues:
Rushdie embeds his rereading of history into a revision of the psy-

chic structure of shame … [through] the battle between two oppos-
ing codes: the masculine code of honor, as it is manifested in the
political world; and the feminine code of shame, which fights against
its confinement within the domestic world. (Rhetoric 186)
Rushdie himself seems to suggest in Shame that the inclusion of women

in a political narrative serves to deconstruct the confinement and
marginalisation of women within domestic spaces. Rushdie’s narrative
emphasises the fact that women’s voices cannot be suppressed even in
patriarchal societies such as Pakistan. This is evident from the narrator’s
confession in the novel:
I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an

almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition,
power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to
have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story
to demand inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies,
obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous com-
plexities, to see my “male” plot refracted, so to speak, through the
prisms of its reverse and “female” side. (173)
With reference to the suppression of women in Pakistan’s patriarchal

society, Inderpal Grewal’s reading of Rushdie’s text is significant. Grewal
argues that “just as much as the lack of shame and the excess of power
on the part of the men lead to violence, frustrated and neglected shame
and powerlessness felt by the women are shown to be potentially
lethal” (135). This is what is shown through the characters of Sufiya
Zinobia and Arjumand Harappa who, in “conspiring against the ruth-
less practices of patriarchal culture”, do not yearn for liberation but “for
dominance and terror” (138). Arjumand, who represents Benazir Bhutto
and is nicknamed the Virgin Ironpants, “loathing her sex, [not only]
went to great lengths to disguise her looks” (Rushdie, Shame 169–170),

but also rejects all her suitors. In so doing she challenges “the gender
role that her culture would have her embrace” (Haywood 10–12). Suleri
also contends that “the burden of internalized violation transforms the
woman into the violator, the destructive power” (Rhetoric 186). Sufiya’s
shameful act of stripping in the final scene of the novel in which she
confronts her husband Omar Khayyam – “on all fours, naked, coated
in mud and blood and shit, with twigs sticking to her back and beetles
in her hair” – becomes a metaphor for “an act of empowerment, a
gathering of strength that finally breaks down the male code of his-
tory” (Suleri, Rhetoric 187). Similarly, Chhunni’s, Munnee’s and Bunny’s
desire to rid themselves of their father’s oppression forces the three sis-
ters to give birth and to raise their son Omar without a father (as these
sisters refuse to disclose Omar’s mother’s identity), which also empha-
sises the rejection of the notion of shame – “the loaded secrecy of the
female body in an Eastern culture” (Suleri, Rhetoric 186).
Suleri’s Meatless Days, written in the form of a memoir, interweaves
the national history of Pakistan with the personal story of her family.
Meatless Days also focuses on the interface between womanhood and
nationhood. In this context, Suleri’s memoir can be read as a feminist
account of the national history of a newly established country, since
gender is foregrounded in the memoir from the opening sentence:
“Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company
of women” (1). Suleri’s statement seems paradoxical when compared to
her description of Pakistan as a place where “the concept of woman was
not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that,
just living [as] a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant” (1).
Sandra Ponzanesi suggests that by highlighting these domesticated roles
of many females in Pakistan, Suleri tends to “challenge the public invis-
ibility of women in Pakistan through their representation within the
private sphere” (79). I would argue instead that it is this, albeit domes-
ticated, community of women in Pakistan to which the narrator Sara
turns to regain a sense of belonging, for it was in Lahore, as she says in
the novel, that her “life showed signs of taking shape again after years
of feeling formless” (101).
Moreover, Suleri’s stance on the simultaneous presence/absence
of women in Pakistan also rejects any homogeneous or monolithic
categorisation of them. Despite the fact that women are shown to be
confined in their domestic roles in Pakistani male-dominated society,
Suleri’s narrative does emphasise, as Asha Sen puts it, “a female defined
space outside of the patriarchal dictates of society” (190–206). Sen finds
Partha Chatterjee’s work useful in highlighting how women’s role in

the subcontinent is constricted in the interest of making “the home or
‘ghar’ the inner sanctuary of the nation, with women its representa-
tion” (199). Following Chatterjee, I suggest that Suleri proposes a com-
plex home–female body–nation nexus in the memoir that tends to link
domesticated women to the construction of nations. For example, dur-
ing her first pregnancy, Ifat tells Suleri that “[m]en live in homes, and
women live in bodies” (Meatless 143). Katherine Sutherland suggests
that the notions of home and homeland for men are abstract because
these are “constructed entirely outside of their bodies” whereas “women
know intimately that our first homes are within the bodies of women,
and these are the homes which precede nations and from which nations
may emerge” (211). In other words, “the nation is born from the nec-
essarily female subject”. Men live in a nation but “only women can
produce a nation” (Sutherland 212). Sara, in the novel, similarly learns
from her mother that “love renders a body into history” (Meatless 164).
Rather than emphasising the disintegration of “the trope of the body”
brought about by Islamic law or a native patriarchy, Suleri accentuates
“a necessary dismemberment that collapses old patterns of essential-
ized identities in order to forge new and multi subjectivities” (Sen 201).
Suleri seeks to foreground women’s diverse experiences by dramatising
the spaces in which women’s bodies exist. Ifat’s audacity in marrying
Javed defies patriarchal norms in going against her father’s decision. Her
father “believed he had a veto power over his children’s lives, but Ifat
was hardly a woman to veto, even when she was six” (121). Likewise,
Dadi’s flair for drama, food and religion makes it impossible to “deal
with [her]” (2), signifying the complex multi-subjectivities of South
Asian women in the cultural context of Pakistan.
While critically reframing a nexus between womanhood and history,
Suleri’s family allegory blurs the boundaries between private and public
tragedies by juxtaposing personal and national histories. For example,
Ifat’s death is inextricably linked to the chaotic state of politics in
Pakistan: her family suspects that Ifat was murdered because of her
husband’s involvement in politics, while some relatives suggest that “it
was [her] Papa’s enemies” (125). Similarly, by juxtaposing Dadi’s and
Bhutto’s death, Suleri depicts Dadi’s tragedy as “consumed by that pub-
lic and historical dying” (17): neither the narrator nor her sisters could
visit Dadi’s grave due to the “free floating anarchy in the air” (18). The
history of Suleri’s family, with all its gains and losses, becomes a trope
for the Pakistani nation “where history is synonymous with grief and
always most at home in the attitudes of grieving” (18–19).
The Islamisation of the country during Zia’s regime remains the central
focus of the memoir, and changes in the political landscape are shown
to bring about changes in the family’s life. “General Zulu” has turned
Pakistan into a fundamentalist Islamic state: “we were about to witness
Islam’s departure from the land of Pakistan. The men would take it to the
streets and make it vociferate, but the grand romance between religion
and the populace, the embrace that engendered Pakistan, was done” (15).
As a gesture of loyalty to his Islamic state, Sara’s father has developed a
new relationship with religion by observing prayers with a vengeance. As
Islamisation is enforced in the country, Dadi, as a gesture of revolt, gives
up praying. In fact, Sangeeta Ray suggests that the house, “like Pakistan,
is being wrenched beyond recognition in the failure to keep the violence
outside distinct from the turbulence brewing inside; the distance between
the ‘differentiated identities of history and ourselves’ is collapsed in the
acknowledgment of ‘our part in the construction of unreality’” (37–58).
This shift in thematic foci from the 1947 Partition to post-
independence Pakistan in the works of Rushdie and Suleri testifies
to the importance of the Islamisation of Pakistan in the history of
the subcontinent. I would argue that this Islamic reassertion, along
with Zia’s foreign policies, has serious implications for the Pakistani
nation. As one of the major concerns of this monograph is identity
politics, it is also important to consider how the shift in thematic foci
from the Partition to the Islamisation of Pakistan in the 1970s marks
a shift from nationalist identities to Muslim identities. Using Islam
as a politically expedient tool, Zia’s religious creed entwined Islamic
extremism and government to such an extent that not only did the
whole political landscape shift towards outward religious observance,
but Zia also propagated affiliation with a Muslim ummah.4 Pakistan’s
participation in the Afghan jihad was informed by the same dominant
paradigm of affiliation with the Muslim ummah that has shaped the
nation’s subsequent responses towards any offences against Islam. The
“Rushdie Affair” is the most obvious example of this, as the Blasphemy
Law caused agitation not only in Pakistan but also among the British
Muslim community that had suffered marginalisation on the basis of
political and legislative factors since the 1970s.5
The “Rushdie Affair” as a catalyst to Muslim identity

discourses
The publication of The Satanic Verses (1988) – which led to the pronounce-
ment of the fatwa, or death sentence, against its author Rushdie – has
continued to underpin public and critical discourses in the West about

emerging religious extremism and Muslim identities in the post-9/11 era.
As Rushdie primarily has an Indian rather than a Pakistani background,
most of his novels are not directly related to the overall foci of this
monograph; the exception is Shame discussed earlier. Born in a middle-
class Muslim family in Bombay during the year of Indian independence
from British rule, Rushdie self-identifies as Indian. But, after his parents’
emigration from India to Pakistan in 1964, his several trips, including an
extended one in 1975 to his parents’ adopted country, inevitably link him
to Pakistan and its turbulent political history. His discussion in Shame is
also informed by this affiliation to Pakistan. My discussion in this sec-
tion will specifically use the fatwa as a paradigm to contextualise Muslim
identity discourses in the West, as it has arguably been one of the most
consequential political events in Britain.
However, it is important to mention at this point that 9/11 is not the
only marker of crisis for Muslims across the world and thus not the only
catalyst for reframing Muslim identities. There are other events that
played a significant role in the rise of Islamism in the UK and the US
before 9/11. Tahir Abbas, in Islamic Radicalism and Multicultural Politics:
The British Experience, usefully examines the rise of Islamism in the UK
before 9/11. Abbas contends that the role of the British media in three
major events – the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the public burning of The
Satanic Verses, and the fatwa against Rushdie – has contributed towards
increasing Islamophobia in the West, which in turn has influenced the
rise of Islamic extremism in the UK since the late 1970s. Abbas argues
that a stereotypical representation of Muslims in the British media
was given particular impetus by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which
resulted in the increasing use of the terms “radical”, “fanatical” and
“fundamentalist”. Dressed in black, two million Muslims on the streets
of Tehran were made symbols and representatives of the international
Muslim community after capturing the attention of the Western media
and public.
However, in 1989, the public burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford
was “the first occasion when Britain began to look at its own Muslim
population in a critical [and] sensationalist manner” (Abbas 96). As the
British media represented Muslims as intolerant, “question[ing] their
loyalty to the state”, Muslims once again felt alienated and marginal-
ised because “no real Islamic experts were permitted to comment on
the situation” (Abbas 96). They felt that they were being denied their
right to freedom of expression. Later, the pronouncement of the fatwa
against Rushdie by Khomeini on 14 February 1989 reinforced negative
mainstream perceptions about Muslims as barbaric and intolerant.

Most importantly, the media represented all Muslims, without any dif-
ferentiation, as a homogenised group that was seen “to pose a serious
threat to liberal and progressive British and Western values” (Allen 43).
By the late 1990s, Islamophobia had become a dominant discourse in
the UK, which resulted in a “renewed interest in questions surrounding
women in Muslim communities” (Abbas 97). Indeed, Islamophobia has
been intensified by statements highlighting the supposed treatment
of women in the subcontinent that tends to segregate the world into
separate spheres, ultimately “recreating an imaginative geography of
West versus East, Us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give
speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas”
(Abu-Lughod 783–790). I discuss this aspect in detail in the next chapter.
Against this backdrop, it is not difficult to understand why Muslim
communities in the UK have needed to (re)negotiate their Muslim iden-
tities since the 1970s. They have felt a strong need for social and political
platforms for two main reasons: firstly, to deal with the phenomenon of
misrepresentation and, secondly, to address issues (cultural, economic,
ethnic and political) that are relevant for their communities in the UK.
Initiatives are being taken in two forms: firstly, through the formation
of organisations – such as Nisa, United Kingdom Action Committee
on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA) and Jamaat-e-Islami, the Bradford Council
of Mosques in 1981 (Allen 44; Malik 4–5) – by Muslim activists, and
secondly, through “entrepreneurial activities” (such as the opening of
Muslim markets, restaurants and travel agents) that helped to reinforce
“a sense of [Islamic] community” (Abbas 52). Such activities accentuate a
“desire for the [sic] ‘Islamisation’ [among] second- and third-generation
British Muslims” (Abbas 51).
Since a large proportion of the Muslim community in the UK origi-
nates from the subcontinent, second-generation British-Pakistanis affili-
ate themselves, in terms of their identities, with the Muslim ummah, as
a result of their affiliation with ancestral home communities. This issue
is highlighted by Hanif Kureishi in his works and further explored by
second-generation writers of Pakistani origin. However, before giving
a brief survey of contemporary Pakistani English fiction that mainly
focuses on Islamic fundamentalism and Muslim identity, it is impor-
tant to consider in more detail ways in which the “Rushdie Affair” has
continued to be used to frame Muslim identities in the West.
A recent wave of protests across the Muslim world has responded
against the derogatory YouTube video Innocence of Muslims (2012)
and the assassination of Salmaan Taseer, an influential governor of
Pakistan’s Punjab province who was murdered by his own bodyguard

for supporting a Christian woman who was deemed to have commit-
ted blasphemy. These are significant examples of religious offences
and have once again reminded us of the fury and furore caused by the
publication of The Satanic Verses. The peaceful and sometimes violent
protests by Muslims against the blasphemous movie risk reinforcing a
reductive view about Islam as a religion of violence and conservatism,
as did the “Rushdie Affair” in the late 1980s. Consequently, Muslims are
often looked upon in the West as religious extremists and intolerant.
In relation to this context, I consider the “Rushdie Affair” as a catalyst
to post-9/11 Muslim identity discourses, because it has reinforced the
emergence of a new identity politics based on religion and culture
rather than ethnicity. In the post-fatwa period, religion and its rituals,
which were previously consigned to private spheres, began to appear in
public spaces.
Given this context, it is also important to consider Rushdie’s class
background and his secular outlook. These have a direct impact on the
way he represents South Asian Muslims to a predominantly Western
audience which, in turn, has led many postcolonial scholars to con-
sider Rushdie as a cultural informant. By framing Rushdie as “a cultural
informant”, I tend to agree with Geoffrey Nash’s observation that writ-
ers such as Rushdie, Kureishi and Monica Ali “do not present migrant
Muslims’ beliefs and attitudes from the inside, but instead promote
a western secular agenda” (12). Abbas alleges that Rushdie’s offence
was deliberate. According to him, The Satanic Verses was written “to
appeal to Western audiences, presenting an Orientalist understanding
of Islam” (Abbas 101). Timothy Brennan also reads The Satanic Verses
as “a fable of Western freedom vs. Oriental fanaticism” (144). However,
critics like Goonetilleke attribute Rushdie’s “insensitivity to his upbring-
ing in a secular family” as well as the influence of Western culture that
jointly contribute to making him a “lapsed Muslim” (qtd in Malak 103).
Whatever his intentions, Rushdie’s choice of figures from Islamic his-
tory, his rewriting of the life of the Prophet Muhammad (Mahound in
the novel) and, in particular, his ironic juxtaposition of the Prophet’s
wives and twelve whores in a chapter entitled “Return to Jahilia” have
undoubtedly offended the sentiments of Muslims who, broadly speak-
ing, frame their identities on the basis of their faith rather than Islamic
culture alone.6
Even if the book is read for its literary characteristics, the allusion
to historical context in the example below is so striking that rather
than interpreting the episode as “a migrant’s eye-view of the world”,
a Muslim reader reads it as an insult to the Prophet’s wives. In other

words, the whole idea of Rushdie’s embrace of phantasmagorical magic
realism to narrate the “story of two painfully divided selves” and “a sec-
ular man’s reckoning with the religious spirit” is lost on a Muslim reader
(Imaginary 394, 397, 396). Rushdie’s juxtaposition of the Prophet’s wives
with the twelve whores behind the curtain, in fact, moves far beyond an
allegory of the migrant’s traumatic view of the world:
By the end of the first year the twelve [whores] had grown so skilful
in their roles that their previous selves began to fade away … .and
the day came when the prostitutes went together to the Madam to
announce that now that they had begun to think of themselves as
wives of the Prophet they required a better grade of husband than
some spurting stone … The Madam then married them all off her-
self, and in that den of degeneracy, that anti-mosque, that labyrinth
of profanity, Baal became the husband of the wives of the former
businessman, Mahound. (Satanic 382–383)
This episode is conceived so licentiously that many practising Muslims

consider it a direct assault on Islam and an insult to the Prophet and his
wives. Rushdie’s mischief with regards to his own doubts about divinity
and the authenticity of the Qur’an is another factor that caused agita-
tion among Muslim communities, given that Rushdie is no authority
on Islamic faith.
Using dastan-e-dilruba as a metaphor for The Satanic Verses, Feroza
Jussawalla defends Rushdie’s novel, identifying a “reformist agenda”
(50). Denying the charges of blasphemy against Rushdie, Jussawalla
argues that the novel was written “out of love for his religion” with an
intention to “reinstill faith in the practitioners” by making Islam less
“hate-filled and less practice-oriented”. Jussawalla further asserts that
“Rushdie undertakes the rewriting of a sacred book [the Qur’an] … to
correct a wrong out of the love for his religion and his forefathers” (63).
According to this logic, by embarking upon a reformist retelling of the
history of Islam, Rushdie is simply following the traditions of other
Indian Islamic groups, such as Ismailis, the Agha Khanis, the Khodjas
and the Bohra, in emphasising the “hybridized” nature of Islam. In
so doing, Rushdie challenges a “particular strain” of Islam, such as
Khomeini’s ( Jussawalla 50–73).
However, Jussawalla fails to notice Rushdie’s own assertion regard-
ing challenging the word of God when he describes “the ideas of the
Qur’an [as] … backward-looking, nostalgic, [and] against the current”
(Imaginary 384). In “In God We Trust”, Rushdie Orientalises Islam and

criticises the Islamic social system by claiming that “the people on
whom Muhammad’s (PBUH) words made the strongest initial impres-
sion were the poor, the people of the bazaar, the lower classes of Meccan
society – precisely those people who knew that they would have been
better off under the old nomadic system” (Imaginary 384). I would argue
that Rushdie’s sweeping generalisations about the Qur’anic message
as primitive and unprogressive, about the pre-Islamic social system as
nomadic, and about the Arabs (who embraced Islam) as “the people of
the bazaar” testify to his own ignorance about Islam and Arab society.7
Rushdie, in his use of the terms “backward-looking” and “old nomadic
system”, implicitly aligns the message of the Qur’an with pre-Islamic
Arab society, evoking Orientalist notions of Islam as being incompatible
with modernity and secularism. What Rushdie fails to highlight to his
non-Muslim readers is the fact that the Prophet Muhammad’s message
made a strong impact on Arabs for two main reasons. Firstly, the rights
that Islam gave to less privileged people in society at that time – such as
slaves, the poor, and in particular women – were exemplary. Secondly,
since Arabs were a most eloquent and articulate people with a remark-
able tradition of poetic language and oral literature, the linguistic elo-
quence of the Qur’an communicated by the Prophet “impressed and
overwhelmed them”.8
Rushdie further illustrates his point by foregrounding the backward-
looking Islamic penalties for prostitution, the prohibition of homosexu-
ality, Islamic laws of inheritance and Islamic law of evidence (Imaginary
400). I would argue that Rushdie’s objections pertaining to the Qur’anic
injunctions about the above listed Laws highlight his own limited
understanding of Islam and the Qur’an. The message of the Qur’an is
universal and is not confined to a specific time or age: it is irrational
to assume that the Qur’an would preach anything that contradicts the
requirement of modern life. Moreover, certain Qur’anic injunctions and
Islamic principles need proper contextualisation. I return to these issues
in detail in Chapter 4. In the view of many believing Muslims, Rushdie
does not qualify, as Jussawalla argues, to reform or even rewrite the
history of Islam, which is in other words the word of God.
Some postcolonial readers would situate Rushdie’s retelling of Islamic
history in the postmodernist tradition. Following Linda Hutcheon’s
lead in “Historiographic Metafiction”, critics such as Suleri can be seen
to take a postmodernist stance on Rushdie’s text in “formal[ly] linking
history and fiction” (11). She attempts to read The Satanic Verses beyond
the narrow binarism of fundamentalism and secularism. In order to
emphasise the cultural specificity of Rushdie’s text, Suleri pleads for the
writer’s “engagement with both cultural self-definition and Islamic his-
toriography” (Rhetoric 191). She argues that the very idea of Islamic sec-
ularism allows one “to complicate the text’s ideological self-positioning,
which in turn suggests that the desacralizing of religion can simultane-
ously constitute a resacralizing of history” (Rhetoric 190). Such a reading
not only allows Rushdie to redefine his own cultural identity but also
legitimises his re-telling of Islamic historiography in accordance with
the “aesthetics of a postmodern and postcolonial mobility” (Rhetoric
191). This proposition also calls for the re-articulation of the term and
the concept of “blasphemy” in two ways: firstly, it demands a rescind-
ing of the fatwa against Rushdie who declares himself a non-Muslim in
“In Good Faith”. In the essay, Rushdie refuses the charge of blasphemy
on the grounds that he is not a Muslim and asserts that if there is no
belief, there is no faith (Imaginary 405). Secondly, it allows a re-reading
of Rushdie’s text as a “gesture of recuperative devotion toward the idea
of belief rather than as the insult” (Suleri, Rhetoric 192).
I tend to disagree with Suleri’s argument. She contends that Rushdie’s
text, with its devotion to a “cultural system that it must both desecrate
and renew” (Rhetoric 191), emphasises the cultural reality of religion.
I would rather argue that instead of emphasising the cultural reality
of religion, The Satanic Verses tends to perpetuate tawdry Orientalist
conceptions about Islam by ridiculing the whole concept of revelation.
Rushdie – rather than criticising the history of Indian Muslim culture
or the homogeneity of Islamic culture as Suleri suggests – questions the
very basis of Islamic faith; the validity of the divine book. Rushdie’s nar-
rative in this episode (“Return to Jahilia”) clearly implies that that the
Qur’an is not the word of God but a collage of the apocryphal Satanic
Verses scribed by a poet in the novel who was “polluting the word of
God” unnoticed by the Prophet (Satanic 367–368).
Hutcheon’s observations are important in this context. In her essay,
“Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and Intertextuality of History”,
she emphasises the mutual constructedness of history and fiction:
“historiographic metafiction challenges … [any] naive textualist or
formalist assertions of the total separation of art from the world” (6).
Following Hutcheon, I argue that Rushdie’s fictional representation
of Islamic history cannot be divorced or separated from the world of
Islam itself and, therefore, a cultural reading of Rushdie’s text does
not efface the theological aspects of the text. The “Rushdie Affair”,
in fact, affirms that a text cannot be divorced from cultural and reli-
gious contexts. Malak flags up this relationship with regards to radical
responses towards Rushdie’s novel. Malak’s hypothesis is also based on

Hutcheon’s argument that “gone now is the belief that art is, or can be,
autonomous, separate from the world. Postmodernist art situates itself
squarely in the context of its own creation and reception in a social and
ideological reality” (“Reading the Crisis” 183). Rushdie himself affirms
this vexed relationship between art, politics and history in “In God We
Trust”. As Malak puts it, “the production of any literary work is cultur-
ally conditioned; subsequently the responses to the literary work are
likewise culturally conditioned” (“Reading the Crisis” 183).
So far I have discussed the reception of The Satanic Verses in literary,
cultural and theological contexts. However, it is equally important to
analyse the “Rushdie Affair” as a political event. Rushdie, in “In Good
Faith”, also contextualises the fatwa in relation to a series of political
events and in doing so he exposes the way the fatwa has been used
for political struggles. Whether it is the alliance between the Muslim
fundamentalist MP Shahabuddin and the Congress to overthrow Rajiv
Gandhi’s government in India, or Iran’s and Pakistan’s manipulation
of Islam to gain political powers within their own countries, the cam-
paign against Rushdie proved an important excuse for raising Muslim
political power in the West in the subcontinent and Iran via different
Islamist groups and organisations. For example, Rushdie in Imaginary
Homelands argues that in Britain, “where secular and religious lead-
ers had been vying for power in the community for over a decade …
the ‘affair’ swung the balance of power back towards the mosques”
(410–411). Endorsing Rushdie in his stance, Kenan Malik too describes
the fatwa as a political campaign rather than a theological one. In Britain
too, according to Malik, the “Rushdie Affair” gave British Muslims an
opportunity to join hands, discarding their own theological differences
in order to enhance their public representation (22).
Nine days after the publication of The Satanic Verses, on 26 September
1988 the book was banned in India by Rajiv Gandhi’s Government.
The book was also banned in Bangladesh, Sudan and South Africa by
November 1988, in Sri Lanka by December 1988, in Kenya, Thailand,
Tanzania, Indonesia, and Singapore by March 1989 and in Venezuela by
June 1989 (for details see, Netton). After the successful banning of the
book in many Muslim countries, various efforts were made by Saudi-
financed Islamic foundations and Jamaat-e-Islami in the UK to get the
book banned in Britain as well. Humayun Ansari in The Infidel Within:
Muslims in Britain Since 1800 states: “It is Islam … that perhaps plays
the most important part in their [Muslims’] lives. … By identifying with
global Islam they were able to see themselves as part of a potentially
powerful community” (18–19). The way that Muslims gathered for

the anti-Rushdie campaign from different parts of the Muslim world
was exemplary, and it became a symbol of solidarity among the whole
Muslim ummah.
Malik usefully examines the affiliation of second-generation British
Muslims with the Muslim ummah in late 1980s Britain. Malik observes
that some British-born moderate Muslims who had not previously
taken an interest in religious practices also joined Islamic groups for
political and social change in a Britain that was then becoming a
multicultural society.9 I have already explained some of the reasons
for the rise of Islamism in the UK since the 1970s.10 Illustrating the
phenomenon in 1980s Britain, Malik argues that the second generation
was struggling for a restoration of “strong identities and moral lines”
as well as for “an intensely individual relationship” with the secular
Western world. In this context, “[r]adical Islam, like many new forms
of fundamentalist faiths, addresses both these needs. It is very much a
child of modern plural societies, with their celebration of ‘difference’
and ‘authenticity’” (28). Therefore, the “Rushdie Affair” succeeded in
contributing to the emergence of “global Islamic identity that over-
rode the cultural particularisms of the past” (Nash 23). In other words,
the “Rushdie Affair” initiated a new phenomenon in identity forma-
tion, which marked a transition from cultural identity to faith-based
identities. Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin have also argued in their book
Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 that “[i]nstead
of ethnicity or nationality, religion was, for the first time, being seen as
a major identity marker around which to organize” (46).
The paradigmatic shift from ethnic profiling to the stereotyping of
Muslims as fanatics on the basis of their faith that was predominant at
the time of the “Rushdie Affair” prepared the ground for responses to
9/11 (Brown 297). Kureishi’s two important works – My Son the Fanatic
and The Black Album – accentuate this paradigmatic shift in Muslim
images after the “Rushdie Affair”.
Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and My Son the Fanatic
In this section, I will use Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) and My
Son the Fanatic (1997) as examples of pioneering texts that highlight
ways in which Muslim identities in late 1980s Britain began to be
transformed after the “Rushdie Affair”. Written from a British-Asian
perspective, Kureishi’s The Black Album and My Son the Fanatic drama-
tise the leaning of second-generation immigrants towards religious
extremism. His stories, by dramatising the clash between faith and

modernity, identify a new Muslim identity based on the performative
aspect of faith. Kureishi, a self-proclaimed Briton and atheist who did
not grow up within Muslim traditions, has often denied his “Pakistani
self [which] was a curse and [he] wanted to be rid of it. [He] wanted to
be like everyone else” (Dreaming and Scheming 25–26). Kureishi refuses
to accept the hyphenated identity that many critics tend to impose on
him by claiming that he is “caught between two cultures”. Kureishi, on
the contrary, asserts: “I’m British; I’ve made it in England” (Kaleta 7).
Even if his characters are Asian or Pakistani, Kureishi contends, he has
always written about London, albeit accentuating the issue of South
Asian immigrant identities. Kureishi’s oeuvre can also be seen to reflect
the beginning of “religious identity politics” (Chambers, British Muslim
Fictions 227) which has now become the most significant subject among
second-generation writers of Pakistani origin, such as Nadeem Aslam
and Mohsin Hamid, in terms of their own (dis)affiliation with a global
ummah in the wake of the 9/11 events.
In the late 1980s, Kureishi began to visit mosques in London and to
witness how young second-generation British-Asians were turning to
Islam. His second novel The Black Album is an examination of this new
phenomenon. Kureishi says in an interview that the whole notion of
immigrant identity for second-generation British-Pakistanis changed
after the fatwa; before the fatwa, Muslims from the subcontinent would
identify themselves as Pakistanis or Asians. This “lexical evolution” to
a Muslim identity, as Chambers describes it, emerged at the time of the
fatwa that led Kureishi to write The Black Album (British Muslim Fictions
234). The novel registers Kureishi’s voice against issues of literary cen-
sorship (freedom of expression) that arose after the public burning of
The Satanic Verses in Bradford and London, as I will discuss.
Set in the late 1980s, The Black Album was written after the public
burning of The Satanic Verses in London and the subsequent rioting
after the pronouncement of the fatwa against Rushdie. In The Black
Album, Kureishi alludes to Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic
Verses, although the author’s identity and the title of his book are left
unnamed. The characters in the novel argue about the book and in one
of the narrative’s climaxes, the unnamed book is publicly burnt by a
group of “fundamentalist”11 Muslim students at one of the colleges in
London, which is a reference to the London rioting after the publication
of The Satanic Verses.
Shahid, who is from a Pakistani immigrant family and arguably
Kureishi’s mouthpiece, is presented as torn between fundamentalism
and hedonism – the demands of militant Islamic extremists at the time

of the “Rushdie Affair” (1989) and the sexual possibilities of the Western
secular culture he lives in. Shahid, on the one hand, wants to please
his conservative Muslim friend Riaz and his group of Islamic extrem-
ists and, on the other hand, he is enthralled by his strong, liberated
college professor and lover Deedee Osgood, who is a staunch feminist
and a representative of popular culture in the novel. Shahid remains
uncertain about his commitments to Riaz and Deedee as:
[o]ne day he could passionately feel one thing, the next day the
opposite. Other times provisional states would alternate from hour to
hour; sometimes all crashed into chaos. He would wake up with this
feeling: who would he turn out to be on this day? How many warring
selves were there within him? Which was his real, natural self? Was
there such a thing? (147)
While Riaz is portrayed as a stereotypical Muslim fundamentalist who

ruthlessly endorses the fatwa levelled against the writer of the controver-
sial book that his extremist group plans to burn at college, Shahid vacil-
lates between fundamentalism and secularism. A conversation between
Riaz and Shahid seeks to highlight Riaz’s uncompromising submission
and adherence to Islamic law, which demands nothing less than death
for the act of blasphemy. As Riaz says: “Stone dead. That is the least
I would do to him. Are you suggesting this is something wrong?” (172).
Shahid, by contrast, is presented as an enthusiastic supporter of “[a] free
imagination, that looking into itself, illuminates itself” (183).
Nahem Yousaf suggests that “Kureishi does not represent Britons of
Asian origin as a homogeneous group, but ‘rather he seeks to illustrate
the diverse forms of membership in any community’. Therefore, Yousaf
identifies a “dialogic tendency” in Kureishi’s novel. According to him,
“[a]lthough The Black Album is clearly critical of both Muslim dog-
matism and Thatcherite selfishness, the book does not, in monologic
fashion, completely repudiate either of these ideologies, both of which
are shown to have real attractions” (qtd in Holmes, “Postcolonial” 311).
My reading corroborates the above and similarly Maria Degabriele’s
argument in an essay “Prince of Darkness Meets Priestess of Porn: Sexual
and Political Identities in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album”, according
to which the novel clearly suggests that Shahid is “attracted to both
and is also somewhat sceptical about both” (n.p.). Upon entering the
mosque, what attracts Shahid most is the great sense of community
that monistic Islam gives to its followers: “Men of so many types and
nationalities … gathered there” and it was difficult to “tell which coun-

try the mosque was in” (Black 131–132). Shahid is surprised by the way
that “[h]ere race and class barriers had been suspended. … Strangers
spoke to one another”; “The atmosphere was [so] uncompetitive, peace-
ful [and] meditative” that he “had to commend himself, too, for regain-
ing his purity” (132). This strong authoritative foundation and spiritual
direction, which gives Shahid a sense of unified identity in relation to
a global ummah, are the qualities that he fails to discover in Thatcher’s
(modern capitalist) enterprise. However, what distances Shahid from
Riaz is the latter’s “single-mindedness” (172) about the “importance of
faith” which, according to Riaz, is deeper than the “individual imagina-
tion” (184). Therefore, at the end of the novel, Shahid’s final decision to
be with Deedee not only highlights his own notion of identity and cul-
ture, but also casts aspersions upon Islamic extremism and on Western
consumerist society, both of which are attractive as well as repulsive in
certain ways to him.
Although the term “Islamic extremism” (or “fundamentalism” in
Kureishi’s writings) gained greater media attention after 9/11, Kureishi
focuses on more or less the same issues in his short story My Son the
Fanatic (1997), which was later turned into a film. Set in London,12
My Son the Fanatic deals with Pakistani diasporic communities in the
UK struggling to negotiate their hybrid identities against the backdrop
of growing Islamisation among second-generation youth in the UK.
Kureishi says in an introduction to the story: “It perplexed me that
young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of
belief that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived”
(vii). This growing apprehension about young Asians in Britain is cap-
tured by Kureishi in his short story through the character of Ali, the son
of a Pakistani taxi driver, Parvez, who not only struggles to provide for
his family but also chooses to be assimilated by giving up his Pakistani
background and adopting British ways. By contrast, when Ali, com-
pletely dissatisfied with his life in the UK, meets other young second-
generation immigrants who have turned to Islam, he evinces disgust
towards capitalistic culture. As Bart Moore-Gilbert argues, “[Ali]’s aban-
donment of his accountancy studies [also] signals his refusal to be part
of an economic system in which humans, too, are simply commodities
to be bought and sold” (167).
Ali’s new found religion – which Parvez discovers through his grow-
ing beard, the observance of prayers and recitation of the Qur’an –
makes him analyse his life in a new light. He realises that while “[e]vil
is all around … The brothers have given me the strength to save myself.
In the midst of corruption there can be purity” (76). After discovering

a spiritual dimension through his interaction with a group of Islamic
extremists, Ali begins to confront his father. He contends that “[t]he
Western materialists hate us”. Ali tries to convince his father that the
“Law of Islam would rule the world” and that the “West was a sink of
hypocrites, adulterers, homosexuals, drug takers and prostitutes” (222).
Parvez looks at Ali in astonishment, unable to believe that they are in
London. Demonising the West, Ali asserts:
“My people have taken enough. If the persecution doesn’t stop there
will be jihad. I, and millions of others, will gladly give our lives for
the cause.”
“But why, why?” Parvez said.
“For us the reward will be in Paradise.” (222–238)
Kureishi’s short story, although written before 9/11, is significant as

it focuses its critique on issues of Islamic extremism after the “Rushdie
Affair” and the simultaneous emergence of faith-based Muslim identities
that later became the subject of “post-9/11 fiction” by second-generation
writers of Pakistani origin. An aspect that is common in the writings of
Kureishi and second-generation writers is the performative nature of
identities among young second-generation Asians in the UK and the
US.13 Whereas the performativity of faith in the form of uncompromis-
ing adherence to Islamic rituals (such as strict prayers and the wearing
of a beard) serves as a significant trope for Islamic fundamentalism in
My Son the Fanatic, music tends to “function as the instantaneously leg-
ible signifier” of modernity and secularism in The Black Album and The
Buddha of Suburbia (Kaleta 8–9). Likewise, fashion serves as an impor-
tant indicator of characters’ identities. While Ali’s identity as a practis-
ing Muslim is reflected through his act of discarding the “fashionable
clothes” and “good suits” that his father has bought him, Shahid’s black
leather jacket “expresse[s] his style, his Jimmy Dean rebel-without-
a-cause look in itself a global symbol of pop-culture machismo and
youthful rebellion” (Kaleta 7).
Chambers’s observations are useful in analysing Kureishi’s narratives as
precursors of Muslim identity discourses. With reference to his characters’
attraction to religion, Chambers illustrates that Kureishi’s stories accentu-
ate “how alienation due to [immigrants’] experiences of racism might
cause young Muslims to turn to religion”. However, Kureishi’s portrayal
in The Black Album and the film My Son the Fanatic “of a restrictive group
of fanatics contains little to indicate what features of Islamism [her term]
might hold their interest” (British Muslim Fictions 229). This partially
explored aspect of emerging “Islamism” and the subsequent framing of
Muslim identities become the main focus of second-generation writers
of Pakistani origin. What differentiates Kureishi from second-generation
writers is the fact that while Kureishi’s notion of Muslim identity is pre-
dominantly informed by the experience of racism and the economic
struggles of the Pakistani diasporic community in Britain, the post-9/11
geopolitical scenario and the US-led “war on terror” form the basis of
identity discourses in the writings of second-generation Pakistani writ-
ers of English fiction. (That is my focus in the next section.) A discourse
of Muslim identity is not new, but it has become more faith-centred in
terms of affiliation with a global ummah after the events of 11 September
2001. The fictional representations of identity politics in the last wave of
the first generation and the new wave of the second generation accentu-
ate the framing of Muslim identities on the basis of this affiliation with a
global ummah against the backdrop of events such as the “Rushdie Affair”
and the fall of the Twin Towers in addition to US realpolitik in the Muslim
world that led to 9/11, which is the main focus of the following chapters.
A new wave of second-generation writers of

Pakistani origin
As stated earlier, in this monograph I aim to emphasise how contempo-

rary fictional narratives by writers of Pakistani origin engage with the
relationship between changing notions of home/belonging and inter-
national “war on terror” rhetoric. However, my choice of writers on the
basis of the above mentioned criteria does not undermine the signifi-
cance of other very distinctive writings such as Daniyal Mueenuddin’s
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), Qaisra Shahraz’s The Holy Woman
(2001) and Typhoon (2003), Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti
(2011) or Maniza Naqvi’s Mass Transit (1998). Whilst writers such as
Aslam, Shamsie, Khan, Hanif, Hamid, Phillips and Gauhar have forged
a link between national and international dimensions of the socio-
political scenario in order to represent ways in which the events and
aftermath of 9/11 have changed perceptions about Muslims from the
subcontinent, Mueenuddin (“Our Lady of Paris” is an exception in
which he also situates Pakistan in a global context), Shahraz and Naqvi
tend to focus more on the complexities of Pakistani class and culture
rather than situating contemporary Pakistan in a global context, which
is the main focus of this monograph. Nevertheless, my argument in
this book pertaining to “gendering the ‘war on terror’” – which aims to
interrogate fictional narratives highlighting the stories from the Muslim

world that feature forced marriages, beatings, rape and women behind
burqas, sometimes used to justify “war on terror” – overtly links even
Shahraz’s and Mueenuddin’s works to post-9/11 contexts.
For example, Qaisra Shahraz’s novels The Holy Woman (2001) and
Typhoon (2003) offer a critique of the notions of “the holy” and “the
unholy” by unveiling the lives of “the Holy woman” and the “shame-
ful woman”, both caught in vicious circles of izzat (honour) and kismet
(destiny). In fact, in both novels, Shahraz uses “holy” and “shameful”
as metaphors in order to foreground the complexities of identity forma-
tion for female protagonists entrapped in the feudal system. Both novels
critically examine oppressive patriarchal customs and the appropriation
of Islam to suit feudal interests even in the modern-day Sind province
of Pakistan, which can still be seen as a centre of patriarchal tyranny. In
The Holy Woman, Zarri Bano, a modern university-educated woman, is
forced by her father Habib to drape herself in the black burqa to become
“Shahzadi Ibadat” (a holy woman) in the name of the “centuries-old
tradition of making of his daughter his heir” after the death of his only
male son (57). Forced to shun the pleasures of life and desire so as to
spend the rest of her life in the pursuit of Islamic knowledge, Bano is
expected to surrender like an obedient daughter whose destiny is “made
and dictated” by the male members of her family (23).
Typhoon, a sequel to The Holy Woman, highlights the agony of shame
and humiliation inflicted on Kaniz (an autocratic Chaudharani, raped
at the age of sixteen) and Naghmana (an urban educated woman,
blamed for a crime of adultery that she never committed) by the people
of Chandigarh; both women become victims of chauvinist pride, one in
private and the other in public. Once again, the destinies of the women
are decided by the head of their patriarchal society. Kaniz, bruised and
shattered by the physical assault in her youth, regains her self-esteem
and izzat by becoming an authoritarian feudal lady who possesses the
power of rejecting proposals from her suitor Younus Raees by clearly
telling him “that she did not wish to be “bedded by any man”” (244). In
retaliation, burning with anger and rage, Younus calls her a “Shameful
woman” (244). Naghmana, on the other hand, is made to receive three
talaqs (divorce) after being publicly denounced as a “whore”, thereby
depriving her not only of her female honour, but also of the right to
spend her life with her first husband. Hassan Zrizi’s observations are
useful in understanding Shahraz’s writings, which:
invite a complex post-colonial and post-harem critical perspective

on women’s predicaments in the Arab-Islamic sphere as a whole [as
well as emphasising] an urgent reconsideration of sexual politics

and women’s involvement in dismantling various areas of mascu-
line domination and building up a modern and gender-democratic
Muslim society. (Kidwai and Siddiqui n.p.)
Shahraz’s writings do not conflate Islamic values and tribal customs;

they quite distinctively foreground the difference between Islamic
laws and primitive feudal customs. Nor do they stereotype Pakistani
society by blunt condemnation of all chauvinist males and submissive
females. In contrast to Habib, Jafar and Charagh Din, who are shown
to be the representatives of the feudal system (although they do regret
their decisions at the end of the novels), the characters of Sikander and
Khawar tend to critique old traditions of feudalism and represent the
new sensibilities of modern Pakistan. Similarly, Kaniz, Zarri Bano and
Firdaus, despite being victims of feudalism, become symbols of what
Zriri calls a “post-colonial and post-harem world of Muslim women”
(Kidwai and Siddiqui n.p.) and take up new roles with pride, integrity
and individuality. Zarri Bano’s new identity as an Islamic scholar,
Firdaus’s unflinching pride as a headmistress despite being a daugh-
ter of “a washer woman” and Kaniz’s authoritative feudal manners
accentuate their roles as women struggling to regain their identity as
individuals.
Similarly, focusing on women through the voice of a female
Christian nurse Alice Bhatti, Mohammed Hanif’s novel Our Lady of
Alice Bhatti (2011) features modern-day Karachi, a city plagued with
corruption, misogyny and police crimes. It is a society deformed
by Islamic extremism and sectarian feuds. Hanif does not shy away
from letting characters articulate derogatory terms such as “Muslas”
(Muslims) and “Choohrah” (Christian sweepers), thereby critically
highlighting the growing religious intolerance in the city. As Alice’s
father Joseph Bhatti (one of the representatives of the disenfranchised
Christian community) says: “These Muslas will make you clean their
shit and then complain that you stink” (1). Similarly, Dr Pereira, a
third-generation physician, laments that “not all Christians are sweep-
ers … [b]ut all sweepers are Christians” (8). Alice, who is destined for
a lower-caste nursing job in a Muslim-dominated nation, is aware of
the fact that while most of the Muslims would not like to eat from a
plate used by an “untouchable” like her, that would not prevent them
from abusing her body. Hence, alongside religious strife, Hanif exposes
the way that women are subject to physical and psychological abuse
on a daily basis by being hacked, strangled, poisoned, burnt, hanged
or even buried alive.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009) is Daniyal Mueenuddin’s col-

lection of linked stories about Pakistani patriarchal society, highlight-
ing the relationship between feudal lords and the peasant classes.
Whether these are grounded in rural Punjab or the glamorous worlds
of Paris, London and Karachi, all the stories emphasise power strug-
gles between rich and poor and between men and women. The
central character in all the stories is a Pakistani landowner called
K.K. Harouni. In “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”, Harouni has
an affair with a servant called Husna, a girl of “neither talent nor
beauty … only determination and cunning distinguished her” (108).
Discovering Harouni’s previous sexual experiences, Husna becomes
a wealthy man’s mistress to fulfil her dreams of escaping a life of
poverty. However, to her disappointment, she is forced by Harouni’s
daughters to leave the house with nothing but the clothes he gave her
after his death.
No matter which class his protagonists belong to, love, betrayal and
guilt remain significant features in Mueenuddin’s stories. Whereas
men are portrayed as hyper-masculine and powerful, women, who are
depicted as having limited access to power, resort to sexual tactics to
achieve their purposes. While foregrounding this inequitable relation-
ship between men and women, Mueenuddin excoriates the perceived
powerlessness of women in rural feudal settings in Pakistan. A simi-
lar story arc is followed in the story “Provide, Provide” that features
Harouni’s opportunistic estate manager Jaglani, who has long been con-
fiscating his master’s property. He also takes Zainab, his driver’s sister
and a married woman, as his mistress. Like Harouni’s, Jaglani’s marriage
brings him pleasure and pain in equal measure; despite loving Zainab,
Jaglani begins to regret his actions upon realising the injustices that
he did to his wife and children. Zainab, like Husna, is also deserted by
Jaglani’s children. The stories suggest that women caught within patri-
archal power structures are not merely victims. They are “ambitious,
calculating ones”, often “using sex as currency. Yet this currency, all too
cheap, always fails them” (Akbar n.p.).
The fictional works discussed above offer a critique of patriarchal
and misogynist tendencies within Pakistan’s patriarchal society, which
is indicative of the fact that not all recent second-generation fictional
output can be summed up under the umbrella of “post-9/11 fiction”.
The broader canvas of second-generation writings of Pakistani origin,
as highlighted in the examples above, is indicative of the diversity
and changing paradigms of Pakistani fiction since the late 1970s that
contribute towards the nation’s long and rich literary tradition.
Rewriting holy terror
In this section, I will focus particularly on Mohammed Hanif, Ali Sethi,

Mohsin Hamid, H.M Naqvi, Maha Khan Phillips and Feryal Gauhar,
who provide counter-narratives to those 9/11 trauma narratives that
have continued to propagate the image of Muslim terrorists since
9/11. I seek to trace the vexed relationship between the subcontinent
and the US through a selection of novels that provide a chronologi-
cal critique of historical events, placing mounting tension between
the subcontinent and the US after 2001 in a longer historical frame-
work. As I explained at the beginning of the chapter, the post-9/11
situation in Pakistan owes a great deal to Zia’s foreign policies and
the reassertion of Islamic principles in social, economic and political
spheres, influencing the rise of Islamic extremism and jihadist culture
in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I emphasise a nexus between national,
regional and international political scenarios from the 1970s onwards.
Foregrounding the US as the primary antagonist, the writers consid-
ered in this section grapple with stereotypes of Muslims and Islam, for
example by exposing the myth of the US as a multicultural society.
Hanif’s and Sethi’s novels scrutinise Zia’s regime and the subsequent
leaderships respectively while locating part of the problem of emerg-
ing Islamic extremism in Zia’s national and foreign policies. Hamid,
Naqvi, Phillips and Gauhar, on the other hand, shift attention from
the national and regional context to the international and global
one in terms of situating contemporary Pakistan in relation to US-led
global politics.
Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Mohammed Hanif’s debut political thriller A Case of Exploding Mangoes
(2008) is not explicitly about 9/11, but it certainly fits into the category
of books that serve as “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction”.
In the novel, Hanif features historical and political figures in Pakistan
during the late 1970s and 1980s who have played a significant role
in shaping the political history of the subcontinent in general and
of contemporary Pakistan in particular. Based on conspiracy theories
surrounding the mysterious historical 1988 plane crash that killed
Pakistan’s former president general Zia-ul-Haq, a theocratic “mullah in
a four-star general’s uniform” (42) along with his top army generals and
the American ambassador Arnold Raphel, Hanif’s narrative focuses on
a number of issues that have contributed towards Pakistan’s image as a
terrorist land, particularly since 9/11.
The novel exposes the CIA’s provision of millions of dollars for

the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, the mushrooming of
the Taliban in northern areas of Pakistan, Zia’s foreign policy and his
Islamisation programme (which played havoc with Pakistan’s social
fabric after the end of the Soviet-Afghan War due to the rise of Islamist
militants in the region). As such, it reconfigures today’s omnipresent
“war on terror” rhetoric. The period of Zia’s military dictatorship is
often considered to be the darkest era of Pakistani history due to the
Islamisation of the country in conjunction with his support of Afghan
mujahideen. The US belief that Pakistan maintained links with the
Taliban after the Soviet withdrawal from the region forms part of the
rationale for the US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004 in the after-
math of 9/11.14 Although all of its events are fictionalised, Hanif’s novel
is pertinent to an understanding of emerging fundamentalist violence
in contemporary Pakistan in relation to US interference within the
region since the late 1970s.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes alternates between an intra-diegetic nar-
rator, Ali Shigri, and an extra-diegetic narrator. The strategy of using
two narrators helps to provide varying perspectives on political and
historical issues. The main plot is narrated by Ali Shigri, an officer cadet
at the Pakistan Air Force Academy. Ali’s father, Colonel Quli Shigri, is
discovered hanged – by his own bedsheet in his own quarters – under
suspicious circumstances. Determined to know who forced his father
into suicide, Ali mounts a plot to avenge his death by assassinating
the president with his poisoned sword during a silent drill inspection.
Before his plan can materialise, Ali is hauled in for interrogation over the
disappearance of his roommate and fellow cadet Obaid, and is thrown
into a Mughal dungeon set up by his own father. There he meets a non-
Muslim communist prisoner, the secretary general of Pakistan sweeper’s
union, and blind Zainab, who has been charged with fornication. The
presentation of these characters enables a bitter satire on the repression
of peasants and the promulgation of the Hudood Ordinance during
Zia’s regime respectively, as I will discuss.
Suspecting his drill instructor Bannon, a hash-smoking Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative, Ali takes him on a plane ride to
extract information from him about his father’s death. At the time of
his death Colonel Shigri was serving his country as well as the CIA’s
mission to arm and pay the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Bannon tells Ali
about the millions of US dollars that his father retrieved from a dead
Pakistani agent in Afghanistan; out of that money, $25 million went
missing and the next day colonel Shigri was found dead in his sleeping
quarters. When Ali asks Bannon why “nobody bothered to find out”
who was responsible, Bannon replies: “‘Because they knew. The orders
came from the top. They didn’t want to rock the boat, so to speak.
I mean it’s no secret. Shit, sure you know. From the very top.’ He waved
to the black mountain with white stones. ‘Mard-e-Haq’” (190).
Along with Ali’s first person narrative, a parallel third person narra-
tion unfolds Hanif’s version of the life of Pakistan’s military dictator
General Zia, who suspects that he is surrounded by enemies due to
his contribution to the Afghan War as well as his Islamisation of the
Pakistani state. Zia is expecting to receive a “Nobel Peace prize [for]
liberating Afghanistan” (269). He requests General Akhtar, the ambi-
tious head of the Inter-Services Intelligence, to raise the level of his
security. Using dark humour, Hanif unveils the religious extremism
and cynical motives behind Zia’s national and foreign policies, and
targets the Islamisation of Pakistani law, specifically the controversial
Islamic Hudood Ordinance that does not differentiate between rape
and adultery.
The latter is highlighted in the novel through the character of blind
Zainab, a victim of gang-rape who, according to the Hudood Law, will
be stoned to death on her failure to produce four male witnesses to
prove her innocence. Hanif exposes the ignorance and buffoonery of
his fictionalised mullah dictator Zia, through his telephone conversa-
tion with the 90-year-old Qazi who has served as “a judge of the Saudi
Sharia Court”. While seeking guidance from the Qazi in Zainab’s case,
Zia asks him whether, if a woman fails to recognise culprits due to
her blindness, she will still be punished according to Islamic law. The
Qazi’s frenzied response to Zia’s query, assuring him that he has “never
heard of a rapist wearing a mask in [his] forty years as a judge” because
“[r]apists like to see their own reflection in the woman’s eyes” (175), is a
clear mockery of the loopholes within the 1979 Hudood Ordinance and
of the way that Zia “play[ed] out his dictatorial politics in the guise [of]
a fundamentalist Wahhabi model of Islamic Law” (see Imran 78–100).
Zia clarifies his query to the Qazi by making it explicit that he is refer-
ring to the physical blindness of the woman, but the Qazi convinces
Zia that the “law doesn’t differentiate between those who can see and
those who can’t” (175); since there is no relaxation for a blind rapist,
the victim is entitled to the same scrutiny. Ultimately, it is blind inno-
cent Zainab’s curse that flies in the form of a crow and takes Zia towards
his tragic fate.
The episode alerts us to the fact that the enforcement of gender dis-
criminatory law was in the interest of maintaining political power. For
this reason, the enforcement of Islamic laws in Pakistan has continued

to generate harsh criticism against Islam by secular Muslims within and
outside Pakistan, as well as in the West, since the 1970s. The episode
is also significant in exposing the unique opportunity the Saudis had
during the Soviet-Afghan jihad to import the Wahhabi ideology of Islam
into Pakistan.
Among other significant foci, Hanif’s political satire foregrounds Zia’s
closeness with the US as well as US manipulation of Zia’s radical Islam.
This “lethal combination of Zia’s zealotry and America’s geo-political
interests”, as Muneeza Shamsie describes it, has driven the country
towards Islamic extremism (“Covert Operations” 15). Zia enthusiasti-
cally collaborated with the US during Reagan’s presidency, accepted
billions of American dollars for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets,
and allowed the border regions of Pakistan to be used by the US Army
as a training base.15 These connections, including the collaboration
between Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the CIA, are foregrounded
in the novel in a party hosted by an American ambassador called Arnold
Raphel on 4 July in Islamabad. The American guests, including the
CIA chief Chuck Coogan and the US cultural attaché, attend the party
dressed up in karakul caps, embroidered jackets and Afghan burqas in
order to pay ridiculous homage to the Afghan fighters. Among the most
significant of the invited guests is a “lanky man with a flowing beard”
who hardly gets any attention from the dignitaries except the CIA chief.
The bearded man introduces himself as “OBL” working for “Laden and
Co. Constructions” (261). As OBL walks among guests, General Akhtar,
on seeing him, acknowledges that “we would have never won this war
without our Saudi friends” (265). The CIA chief also suddenly “put[s]
his hand on General Akhtar’s shoulder, turn[s] towards OBL and say[s],
‘Nice meeting you, OBL. Good work, keep it up’” (266).
Many second-generation Pakistani writers and readers who grew
up in the late 1970s – arguably the most difficult period in Pakistan’s
history – can relate to Hanif’s cynicism with regards to Pakistan’s politi-
cal and military establishment. Although the main plot of A Case of
Exploding Mangoes is woven around the mystery regarding Zia’s assas-
sination, Hanif is also interested in other major issues that were bound
to have repercussions for Pakistan: Zia’s politics of Islamisation along
with the US presence in the region are mainly responsible for unleash-
ing the forces of Islamic extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan that
led both countries towards their present traumatic phase. Moreover,
the alliance between the US and Saudi Arabia guided Zia in the set-up
of an Islamic state based on the Saudi version of Islam, which finds
expression in the story of Zainab. Similarly, the appearance of Osama

Bin Laden (ally of the US during the Soviet-Afghan War) at the ambas-
sador’s party, and the CIA chief William Casey’s visit to Zia, accentuate
Zia’s closeness with the US as well as ties between the ISI and the CIA.
These ties not only resulted in the upsurge of Islamic extremism during
Zia’s time due to his pro-Taliban policies, but they also made Pakistan a
main target of US animosity after 9/11 as a result of the presence of the
Taliban mujahideen in the border areas.
Whereas Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes predominantly focuses
on Zia’s era and his reaffirmation of Islamic values in order to contex-
tualise historically the rise of extremism in Pakistan, Sethi’s novel – in
addition to its focus on Zia’s Islamisation reforms – links indigenous
political situation to the global political scenario by extending his
fictionalised political history to Musharraf’s regime.
Ali Sethi’s The Wish Maker

Spanning three generations of a Pakistani family based in Lahore, The
Wish Maker charts, in a non-chronological style, the tumults within
Pakistan’s political and social history from the 1947 Partition to the
post-9/11 era. Sethi’s grand sweep of history – which encompasses
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s execution in 1977, various military dictator-
ships followed by short-lived democratic governments of Benazir
Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, Zia’s misogynist Islamisation and General
Musharraf’s project of “enlightened moderation” to combat extremism
and terrorism – is an excellent account bringing into clear focus the
failures of various political leaderships in Pakistan since the Partition
to the late 1990s. In so doing, the novel illustrates the historic failure
of Pakistani leaders to combat the indigenous ethnic and sectarian
problems which largely provide the backdrop to Pakistan’s post-9/11
image as a land harbouring terrorists. In addition to this, the novel
also provides brief flashbacks to the pre-Partition days through selec-
tive episodes of Daadi’s memories from undivided India and post-
independence Pakistan, but also puts the family history and personal
relationships in the larger context of nationalistic politics. In so doing,
the narrative slowly bridges the lapse of time between the three genera-
tions, as well as between Zaki’s childhood experience of Lahore and the
turbulent city he finds in its place upon his return as an adult. If we
situate The Wish Maker within the above-mentioned matrix of concerns
whilst historically contextualising the post-9/11 image of Pakistan,
Sethi’s novel too can safely be included in the category I term as “ret-
rospective prologues to 9/11 fiction”.
The novel begins with the narrator Zaki Sherazi’s return to Lahore
from the US for his cousin (actually aunt) Samar Api’s wedding. Zaki’s
father was an air force pilot who died in an accident when he was only
two months old. Zaki is therefore brought up by his liberal mother
Zakia, a journalist and a political activist, who is shown to be advocating
social reforms through the magazine she edits. Brought up in a house
peopled mostly by women (Zaki’s headstrong mother, his conservative
and domineering Daadi, the maidservant Naseem and Samar Api), Zaki
experiences an unusual childhood as a spectator of two different and
opposing worlds: liberalism and traditionalism, cosmopolitanism and
feudalism. Daadi and Zakia are women of opposing worldviews in every
respect. Given his mother’s political activism, Zaki encounters the life
of political unrest and protests that sometimes culminate in spending
nights in police custody. Zakia’s activism, though, is utterly disapproved
of by her mother-in-law, who is “rooted in age-old certainties” (Shamsie
643) and often accuses Zakia of bringing “shame” upon her family
(129). Regardless of her mother-in-law’s occasional complaints, Zakia
continues her campaigns against injustice, domestic violence and the
repression of women in Pakistan. Zakia, in her first job as a journalist,
proves herself an “interventionist”, who takes “risks” and gives “thrills”
at the time of censorship (121). Disillusioned with the military interven-
tion in Pakistan, she unhesitatingly writes “critiques of the Islamization
programme (‘Leave It to Allah: God’s Mandate to Ward Off the Threat
of Democracy’) … ‘New Legislation of Blasphemy’ … ‘Adultery Made
Crime’, ‘Textbooks to be Revised in Accordance with Spirit of Islam’,
‘New Compulsory Subjects to be Taught in School’” (120), which has
continued to trigger debates in the West about intolerance and Islamic
patriarchy as possible causes of women’s suppression in the Muslim
world. Despite her editor’s repeated warnings with regard to her skills
of intervention, Zakia stays true to her mission by reporting about
CIA operatives, the Reagan Administration’s “unnamed liaison in the
Pakistani military”, “the country’s banned sportswomen”, and forced
“head-covering [of] newsreaders” (120–121). Zia’s death in a plane crash
in the novel raises the hope for people like Zakia that they are about
to embark upon a new era. The end of the eleven dark years of Zia’s
militancy and the subsequent return of democracy through the historic
success of the Pakistan People’s Party is depicted in the novel through
people’s optimistic views about the future of the country. For example,
Sethi’s depiction of Lahore as a relatively peaceful city with billboards
showing advertisements from various multinational companies about
foreign products reveals the sentiments of the common public for
democratic governments. However, what is clearly to be understood

here is that this transformation to sham democracies in Pakistan has
been far more destructive than dictatorships, due to “a combination of
corruption, maladministration and irresponsibility” (Talbot 143). This
is foregrounded in the novel through Daadi’s grumblings that three
years “have gone by and none of it [promises of the new government to
rescue the sinking economy and improve health and education depart-
ments] has happened, not one thing” (256). Nevertheless, the editorial
of Zakia’s Women’s Journal continues to describe Benazir Bhutto’s era
as a time of “rediscovering [the] national soul” (255), with a hope that
“with this second chance, she [Benazir] will prove worthy of our trust”
(255). However, Benazir’s era also proves to be one of hope and disap-
pointment, due to her husband Asif Zardari’s (“Mr 10 per cent”) alleged
liking for “kick-backs” in awarding commercial contracts (Talbot 153)
as well as other charges of corruption. Despite all the corruption, Zakia
pleads for Benazir: “We know there is corruption. There has always been
corruption … Why don’t we look at the corruption of those who rule
with guns” (257). Consequently, the readers of the magazine begin to
question its credibility because of its “continued engagement with a
discredited government” and “state terrorism” (257–258). The increas-
ing corruption puts Benazir in a vulnerable position and she is soon
dismissed from her office and superseded by the short-term government
of Nawaz Sharif. Zakia, along with her other activist friends, protests
against the dismissal of Benazir Bhutto.
Sethi’s grand sweep of Pakistan’s political history takes us to yet
another military coup in a significant episode of the novel in which
Zakia, Daadi and Naseem are watching a foreign television channel
and hear the discussion “about the fragile situation in Pakistan” (324).
Although not explicitly named in the novel, the way that the whole
episode is framed is clearly reminiscent of Pervez Musharraf’s dramatic
military coup in 1999. “PTV headquarters was surrounded; the prime
minister was still under house arrest; the sacked army chief had finally
landed with very little fuel in his aircraft, and was changing his clothes
and appear [sic] on PTV to address the nation.” Daadi immediately
responds: “‘Martial law’”. Zakia too murmurs: “‘Martial law’”. “They
change the channel and Naseem goes into the kitchen to prepare
dinner” (324). Musharraf’s regime indubitably remains a significant part
of Pakistan’s post-9/11 political history in terms of his alliance with the
US in its anti-terrorism campaign, an alliance that was strongly endorsed
by President Bush: “President Musharraf is a leader with courage and
vision … I am proud to call him my friend” (Rashid 148). Once again,
like Zia’s funded jihad against the Soviets, Musharraf not only sent
army units into South Waziristan but also received $500 million for the
country’s “logistic support to US forces” (Rashid 148) in order to fight
al-Qaeda militants and the Taliban. Both of these US-funded military
actions by military dictators have led to grave repercussions not only
for Pakistan but also for the entire region.
Therefore, by aligning the “significant moments in each of the main
characters’ lives” with the “periods of political turmoil in Pakistani
history” (Cilano, Contemporary 125), and by foregrounding characters’
conflicting political dispositions, Sethi overtly criticises the Pakistani
politics that “revolve around personalities and patronage, not ideas
and institutions” (Talbot 144). For example, being a staunch oppo-
nent of Zia’s military dictatorship and his Islamisation policy, Zakia
feels optimistic about Pakistan’s future as a result of Benazir’s historic
success in elections; Daadi, however, calls it just another “story that
had been made up to fool people like Naseem and to make people
like [Zakia] feel better about themselves” (61). Daadi even condemns
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for “some terrible things” that only “caesars and
pharaohs had done to their enemies” (62). Similarly, Nawaz Sharif’s
government is shown to be no exception to political corruption and
financial mismanagement; he also “talked about the well-known
corruption of the last government, and promised to make improve-
ments … But there were stories about him, and they had led to accusa-
tions that were being considered in the Supreme court” (318). Thus,
Sethi’s novel can be read as a powerful rebuttal of the political structure
of Pakistan, which is based on patronage, party politics and personal
whims rather than the strengthening of state institutions. My point here
is that none of the above-discussed representatives of the state made any
efforts to engage with the social, ethnic, sectarian and religious problems
or to combat the rise of intolerance within Pakistan; as a result, three
A’s dominate the history of Pakistan: “Army, Allah, America”. To this,
Zakia adds “avaam (public)” (123). It is in this context that Zaki, whose
narrative perspective in the novel is informed by his experiences of
living in pre- and post-9/11 Pakistan and in the US, poses a significant
question: “how can you ask the same people – the very same people –
to come back and run the show? Can you give me a better example of
a compromise?” (402).
While the action slowly continues to build momentum, the readers
are taken into the world of feudalism through the characters of Daadi’s
sister Chhoti, her husband Fazal, and their daughter Samar Api. In this
world run by feudals, Sethi exposes the cruel practices of patriarchy and
the lives of those women who are perceived to have designated roles
in society as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. With “an insider’s
tormented involvement”, Chhoti describes the lives of the “women
of landed families” as ones of “waiting for occasions [such as wed-
dings, funerals, milaads and ashuras] that required the playing of roles”
without offending their feudal lords (44). Those who transgress are
“abducted and paraded in the streets” (45). Nevertheless, it is impor-
tant to consider the complexity embedded in the social position of the
respectable women of feudal families that in fact obfuscates rather than
reveals the kind of oppression they face; there are no universal struc-
tures of patriarchal domination. It is in this context that Butler criticises
“the notion of universal patriarchy … for its failure to account for the
working of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which
it exists” (Gender 5). On the one hand, landladies assert their control
and authority over subservient daughters-in-law and over women of
lower classes and, on the other hand, this privileged status marker
institutionalises the seclusion of these landladies. As Chhoti also says,
it is the “requirement for the women of landed families” (44) because
such exclusionary practice is the symbol of class and prestige for them;
it differentiates them from other working-class women. This hierarchy
that charts women’s privileged position in the feudal set-up is illustrated
in Samar’s description of her life in the village: “Sometimes, when our
car goes through the town, strange women come out on the balconies
and stare at us” (44). These women are looked upon as superior and
empowered.
However, the other side of the picture cannot be ignored; the novel
also interrogates the othering of women within their own patriarchal
communities. This signals the complex subject positions of Chhoti and
Samar. Samar is not allowed to sit with her male cousins or to leave the
house in her village. The complex position of feudal ladies, in which
they are simultaneously powerful and subordinate, dismantles the
monolithic images of (Muslim and Asian) women in the Third World.
As Mohanty corroborates, the category of Third-World women is auto-
matically defined as “religious (read ‘not progressive’), family-oriented
(read ‘traditional’), … domestic (read ‘backward’), and sometimes revo-
lutionary (read ‘their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war; they-must-fight!’)”
(Mohanty, Russo and Torres 72). Chhoti’s and Samar Api’s characters
occupy a range of privileged and repressed positions. In order to keep
her daughter away from the “repressed environment” (45) of the feu-
dal set-up, Chhoti uses her power as a decisionmaker and sends Samar
to live with Daadi in Lahore. Samar’s father, Fazal, does not object to
this. In Lahore, quite contrary to what her feudal background prepares

her for, Samar not only gets involved in the romantic fantasies of
Bollywood films, waiting for her Amitabh, but also ends up in a for-
bidden love affair. According to the feudal traditions regarding female
chastity, this is a transgression that changes her life forever; as soon as
Samar crosses the limits imposed on her by her feudal system, she is
punished and immediately made to leave Lahore. Hence, Chhoti’s and
Samar’s lives straddle positions of power and powerlessness. The novel
is, in this respect, a narrative at variance with the dominant Third-
World repressed-women ideology. As I have argued previously and as
my reading of the novel has shown, it is clearly not only patriarchal
dominance that characterises Pakistani society, but matriarchal cultures
also define the Muslim world.
While Hanif and Sethi primarily focus on pre-9/11 US relations with
the Muslim world, providing historical context to the contemporary
period, the novels by Mohsin Hamid and H.M. Naqvi, which I discuss
next, are written with an emphasis on repercussions of the events of
9/11 for Pakistan, such as the subsequent discriminatory treatment of
Pakistani Muslims in the West. Their novels successfully capture chang-
ing notions about Muslims in the UK and the US. These changed per-
ceptions have played an important role in the construction of post-9/11
Muslim identities.
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

In contradistinction to “9/11 fiction” such as John Updike’s The Terrorist
(2006), Don De Lillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Sherman Alexie’s Flight
(2007), which reinforce the dominant US public rhetoric of equating
Islam with terrorism, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
(2007) is an attempt “to account for the events of 9/11 in terms of US
activities in the Third World and Muslim migrant experience of racist
othering in America” (Nash 108). Debunking the terrorism and trauma
narratives of the category I have just mentioned, Hamid’s novel offers
a compelling portrait of a “lover of America” who moves from being
a capitalist “fundamentalist” to a Pakistani activist protesting against
global American terrorism.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist engages with the existential dilemma
and identity crisis of a Muslim narrator, Changez, a Princeton graduate
and subsequently a successful financial analyst at a New York valuation
firm named Underwood Samson. The novel opens in a café in the old
Anarkali district of Lahore where Changez unfolds his life story to an
American stranger whose identity remains a mystery until (and beyond)
the end of the novel. The American interlocutor remains anonymous

and mute throughout the narrative, which gives Changez full control
over the story. Hamid uses this strategy to give his marginalised/
subaltern protagonist the power of the centre, thereby allowing him
to highlight and comment on post-9/11 xenophobia in the US from
the point of view of a secular Muslim who has lived there as a suc-
cessful financial analyst. By keeping his American interlocutor silent
and furthermore by making Changez speak on his behalf, interpreting
his gestures and giving voice to his silenced thoughts, Hamid seeks to
“challenge the complacencies of public rhetoric” according to which
“virtually every Muslim in sight was a terrorist” in the US since 9/11.
From this perspective, The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a “postcolo-
nial perspective on revolutionary violence” by teasing apart “identities
that war on terror fuses: Muslim and terrorist” (Scanlan 266).
As the story progresses, Changez’s monologue unfolds a journey from
his American infatuation to disillusionment with America against the
backdrop of 9/11, a journey from being a lover of America to an anti-
American activist who categorically refuses to remain complicit with
US capitalistic fundamentalism. When describing his experiences in
pre- and post-9/11 America, Changez highlights the increase in eth-
nic profiling in the US that began on 11 September. In this context,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, according to Nash, accentuates: “a non-
western migrant’s view of what it is like to live in the West; a ‘Third
World’ perspective on America’s global activities; and an insider’s view
of how it feels to belong to a Muslim nation” (Nash 108).
Just before joining the firm at New York, Changez goes to Greece
on holiday with his fellow Princetonians and falls in love with Erica,
an American woman emotionally troubled by the death of her child-
hood friend and lover Chris. As the story progresses, readers witness
the intensification of Erica’s traumatic state after the fall of the Twin
Towers. She eventually disappears from hospital leaving Changez in
a state of bewilderment. Changez’s relationship with Erica becomes
a metaphor for the American relationship with the Muslim world in
the aftermath of 9/11. Drawing upon this relationship, Peter Morey
convincingly argues that Erica is made:
to embody the whole fate of her home nation after September 11.
The tentative flowering of her relationship with Changez represents
the possibility of East/West rapprochement in the cosmopolitan
spaces of New York, but she begins to diminish physically and
mentally in the novel’s second half. (135–146)
Blurring the boundaries between public and private grief, Erica becomes
a symbolic correlative of her country – Am/Erica. Paralleling the way
the US government and nation become fixated with grief after the
9/11 tragedy, Erica also disappears into what Morey calls a “dangerous
nostalgia” after 9/11 (140).
Soon after joining Underwood Samson, Changez goes to Manila
on another project where he witnesses the 9/11 tragedy unfold on a
television in his room. His “initial reaction”, in the form of a “smile”
at the collapse of the Twin Towers, serves as a turning point in
Changez’s life. Changez himself confesses his sense of perplexity at the
“remarkable” pleasure at witnessing the demise of thousands of innocent
civilians but:
at that moment, [his] thoughts were not with the victims of the
attack – death on television moves [him] most when it is fictitious
and happens to characters with whom [he has] built up relationships
over multiple episodes – no, [he] was caught up in the symbolism of
it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her
knees. (43)
Changez’s sense of delight over the fall of the Twin Towers symbolises
his new awareness about Western neo-imperial hegemony and urges him
to take the first step towards his emancipation from American imperi-
alistic ventures. He comes to realise that while working for Underwood
Samson (which has the initials U.S.), he is also a part of the US politics
of domination, a particular kind of “American fundamentalism”.
Moreover, on his return from Manila, Changez’s visit to his family in
Pakistan provides him with a chance to further contemplate US inter-
vention in the region, Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan, and the
threat of war from neighbouring India. At this stage, he comes to realise
how his country of residence has been creating trouble for his home-
land and the subcontinent, as he says “that no country inflicts death
so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many
people so far away, as America” (110). Changez finds himself metamor-
phosed. When he returns to America, he refuses to shave off his beard
which, he now believes, has become a symbol both of his individuality
and of his Muslim and Pakistani identity, though he never explicitly
identifies as a Muslim in the novel until he experiences discrimina-
tion at airports, in the workplace and in the streets after 9/11. Hence,
troubled by discrimination, along with Erica’s illness and the political
situation in post-9/11 Pakistan, Changez loses all interest in his job.
In addition, Changez’s discussion with the Chilean publisher Juan

Bautista serves as an eye-opener with regards to his own role as a
“modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time
when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine” (91). This
is also figured as “reluctant fundamentalism” in the novel. Changez
refuses to “participate any longer in facilitating [the US] project of dom-
ination” and global capitalism (94–95). However, he only regrets that it
took him so long to arrive at this decision. He thanks Bautista “for help-
ing [him] to push back the veil behind which all this had been concealed!”
(95). Therefore, despite being aware of the risk of being fired from the
company, he abandons the project of assessing an ailing publishing firm
in Chile and returns to New York, where he packs his things to return to
Pakistan. Changez feels no regret in sabotaging his ambitious career. He
joins the university in Lahore as a lecturer and an activist who protests
against US foreign policy.
Invoking Said’s phrase the “voyage in”, Scanlan argues that The
Reluctant Fundamentalist is one of those postcolonial novels that revise
“the West’s vision of itself as a haven for the oppressed, a fortress
of secular reason besieged by a fanatical Orient, whose latest repre-
sentatives are migrants bearing bombs and contagion” (267). Similarly,
Changez’s “double-edged relationship” with America, using Chambers’s
words (British Muslim Fictions 185), tends to deconstruct the binary that
contemporary discourses on terrorism draw between moderate and
fundamentalist/extremist Muslims. This “double-edged relationship” is
also significant in describing Changez’s transformation into a particu-
lar kind of “reluctant fundamentalist”. Changez has never been anti-
American or a religious fundamentalist.16 He is described in the novel as
the product of an American university who is passionate about his job
at an American firm and is “earning a lucrative American salary” (43).
He also cherishes the relationship with his American girlfriend Erica.
In fact, he is shown as a cosmopolitan who embraces the “American
dream”, feels like “a New Yorker”, and is expected to contribute his tal-
ent to the society he is joining. Changez is happy to do so (57, 20, 29).
Changez’s bourgeois, liberal, family background in Pakistan also
accentuates the fact that he does not have any leaning towards reli-
gion. Scanlan convincingly argues that Changez’s use of the term
“the fundamentals” is purely restricted to “systematic pragmatism”,
“efficiency” and “maximum return”, which he learns while working
with Underwood Samson (Reluctant 22). “Focus on the fundamentals” is
Underwood Samson’s “guiding principle … a single-minded attention
to financial detail, teasing out the true nature of those drivers that
determine an asset’s value” (Reluctant 59). Repeatedly, Changez associ-

ates merciless capitalism with the fundamentalism that characterises
Underwood Samson. When Changez sabotages his own career, he says
that his “days of focusing on fundamentals were done” (92). While hav-
ing dinner with the American in Lahore, “he has occasion to allude to
strict Muslims, [but] it is notable that he calls them not fundamentalists
but ‘religious literalists’” (Scanlan 275); this, according to Nash, is the
“closest it gets to Islamic fundamentalist” (110). Changez redefines the
whole notion of “fundamentalism” (which in US political discourses
is confined to Islamism after 9/11) in a new context. Nash also argues
that the terms “fundamentalism” and “fundamentalist” are applied in
the novel “neither to Pakistan, Islam, nor any Muslim individual or
group” (110). Instead, for Changez, fundamentals mean the merciless
capitalism of the US.
Given this context, Changez’s metamorphosis from a New Yorker to a
Pakistani occurs as a result of his speculations about US acts of terrorism
perpetrated against innocent American Muslims – ordinary New Yorkers
like him. While returning from Manila, when he is made “to strip down
to [his] boxer shorts” and separated from his “team at immigration” (44),
he feels that he has been transformed from a successful professional in
the US into a terrorist suspect – a “Fucking Arab” (70). He is subject to
verbal abuse in the US streets. Overnight, he becomes “a subject of whis-
pers and stares” (78). However, he is not merely disappointed at the dis-
crimination that he experiences at airports and on the streets in the US.
For “multiple reasons, [he] was deeply angry” (78). Changez even tries
to ignore rumours from Pakistan, but he cannot overlook the FBI raids
on “mosques, shops and even people’s houses”, incidences of Pakistani
cabdrivers being beaten, and the way “Muslim men were disappearing …
into shadowy detention centers for questioning” (56).
Changez’s political awakening in the novel is significant for situating
contemporary Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan and the Middle East, in
globalised structures of power. What Changez finds hardest to tolerate
are the acts of violence carried out by the US – either by interrogating
innocent Muslims in the US, or by bombing the “ill-fed Afghan tribes-
men” (59) – and its constant interference in the internal affairs of the
Middle East, Pakistan and beyond. By juxtaposing the military power
and economic gains of the US, Hamid exposes the fundamentalism of
the American state. As Anna Hartnell suggests, “Underwood Samson
seems to represents the pragmatic face of American state power. It is
consistently described in the novel as ruthlessly future oriented” (340).
Being a moderate and a liberal Muslim with an American dream who

has been trained at an American firm, Changez, is “so capable – of fun-
damentals” (60). However, when Changez understands how the US has
continued to use violence to achieve its imperialist goals as well as to
counter terrorism, he feels disgusted at his complicity in US ventures.
When he is able to see how, for its own economic gains, the US is using
its military powers to wage a war against innocent civilians in many
countries, Changez asserts: “I am a believer in non-violence; the spill-
ing of blood is abhorrent to me, save in self-defence … I am no ally of
killers” (110). It is also important to consider that Changez is not shown
in the novel to wage any violent jihad against America by becoming a
jihadist. He simply refuses to remain an ally of the US by showing reluc-
tance to be a “fundamentalist” any longer – a “fundamentalist” who
believes in merciless capitalism.
H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy

H.M. Naqvi’s young hip-hop protagonist Shehzad in Home Boy (2009)
shares features with Hamid’s protagonist Changez in The Reluctant
Fundamentalist. Shehzad, like Changez, is presented as a liberal and
secular Muslim who happily blends into the new and exciting world of
New York City. However, his life, like Changez’s, changes after the fall of
the Twin Towers. Home Boy is a tale of three young friends of Pakistani
origin in the aftermath of 9/11. Shehzad Ali, known among his friends
as Chuck, is a recent immigrant to the US. He is a New York University
graduate who has been fired from his banking job and now drives a cab.
Shehzad’s friends, a PhD drop-out called Ali Chaudhry (AC) and a New
Jersey-raised DJ and producer called Jamshed (Jimbo) are also shown to
be thoroughly assimilated in this cosmopolitan city.
Naqvi, like Hamid, challenges myths about the US as a global cosmo-
politan space. Both Chuck and Changez happily embrace the American
dream and face no significant problem in being a part of mainstream
pre-9/11 American society. Both become New Yorkers immediately;
Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist assesses that he was “in four
and a half years, never an American” but “was immediately a New
Yorker” (20). Similarly, although Chuck is an “expatriate”, he “claimed
the city and the city had claimed [him]” (Homeboy 3). Like Changez, he
also realises that you can “spend ten years in Britain and not feel British,
but after spending ten months in New York, you were a New Yorker, an
original settler”(15). His friend Jimbo is born and bred in Jersey, so he is
also “a bonafide American” (3).
Through these three characters, Naqvi foregrounds experiences of

successful secular emigrant Muslims settled in the US who nevertheless
become the targets of “war on terror” rhetoric after 9/11. What Naqvi,
like Hamid, tends to focus on in his novel are the lives of those Pakistani
Americans who are shown to be least interested in the practice of reli-
gious rituals or performativity of their faith. For example, Chuck, unlike
Jimbo’s sister Amo, does not “care to wear [his] identity on [his] sleeves”
(55). Similarly, AC’s atheism allows him “extensive culinary latitude” (1)
and he enjoys drinking and the company of women by shedding his
Muslimness. AC is even shown to be critical about Islam which, accord-
ing to him, is “not good and peaceful, chum … It’s a violent, bastard
religion, as violent as, say, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, whatever.
Man’s been killing and maiming in the name of God since the dawn
of time” (97). Such details pertaining to the cosmopolitan outlook of
Naqvi’s characters are extremely significant for understanding the racial
profiling in the US that deprives these three secular Muslims of their
privilege of being called “New Yorkers”. As Bidhan Chandra Roy con-
vincingly argues, “in losing this privilege, their ability to self-identify as
cosmopolitan New Yorkers is replaced by a new status as an excluded
Other in an America that now rigidly defines the world, to use the
words of George Bush, as being ‘either with us or against us in the fight
against terror’” (“The Tragic Mulatto” n.p.).
Roy’s observations are pertinent as circumstances dramatically change
for these three friends in the petrified city that is post-9/11 New York.
Chuck comments on his post-9/11 situation with pain and fear: “You
could feel it walking down some streets: people didn’t avert their eyes or
nod when you walked past but often stared, either tacitly claiming you
as their own or dismissing you as the Other” (45). After their bitter expe-
rience at a bar, during which these three amigos are mistakenly taken
as “A-rabs” (another shared feature with The Reluctant Fundamentalist),
they come to realise that their adopted country has changed and they
“are not the same” (23–24). Like Changez’s, Shehzad’s American dream
shatters when he, along with AC and Jimbo, is interrogated by the FBI
agents at the house of their missing compatriot Shaman for supposedly
being involved in terrorist activities; the three friends are hauled off
to Manhattan’s notorious metropolitan detention centre. They are not
only denied a phone call but also sarcastically informed that since they
are not Americans, they “got no fucking rights” (107). When released
from FBI custody, Chuck faces humiliation at the hands of other mem-
bers of the Pakistani community in the US, such as Abdul Karim’s
family, who scold Chuck for bringing shame on Muslims the way the
Taliban did in blowing up the Twin Towers. Chuck immediately feels

like a “marked man” – a petrified “Other” – and the circumstances force
him to make the decision to leave the country that he came to in order
to fulfil his dreams. He tells his mother that he “wants to come home”
(206–207).
By incorporating episodes of FBI interrogation and the political
speeches of George Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, Naqvi tends to
challenge myths about the US as a global cosmopolitan space. From
this perspective, post-9/11 racial profiling in the US, as highlighted in
the novels of both Hamid and Naqvi, becomes a significant trope of
American nationalism. As such, both the novels emphasise a dominant
American–subaltern Muslim binary.
Feryal Ali Gauhar’s No Space for Further Burials

Feryal Ali Gauhar’s novel No Space for Further Burials (2007) also evokes
global narratives of terror and Islamism. Gauhar uses a different strategy
from Hamid in order to challenge, again in Scanlan’s words, “the simplic-
ity of public rhetoric” about terrorism (267). While Hamid’s American
interlocutor remains silent in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Gauhar
makes readers see the devastation of war-ridden Afghanistan through
the eyes of her American narrator by placing him in Afghanistan.
The narrator is a US Army medical technician incarcerated by Afghan
warlords in an asylum in Afghanistan, a country described by Gauhar
as a “valley of the dead” (3). He is known among his other asylum
inmates as American Firangi. Gauhar clarifies her stance on the choice
of narrator in interview:
I felt it was important to explore my world from the perspective of

those men and women who find themselves in the midst of a war
which seems to have no purpose. I wanted to draw out the human
dimension of the “enemy” or the “victor” and the “vanquished”.
I felt I could do so by giving a voice to the American who comes
with his own tale of sorrow, who is not always so sure of the agenda
of his country, who is as vulnerable to violence and treachery and
boredom and betrayal as anyone else, anywhere else. (Rohleder n.p.)
Gauhar’s novel aims to highlight the impact on Afghanistan of the

2001 World Trade Tower attacks and subsequent “war on terror” rhetoric
in the last decade. The roots of US military intervention in Afghanistan
lie in the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when the US initi-
ated an anti-Taliban campaign to legitimise military operations against
the Taliban, affiliating them with al-Qaeda. The main plot deals with
the impact the war has on the social structure of the region. However,
Gauhar’s emphasis on the mistreatment of women in the novel shows
that, like Uzma Aslam Khan, she is particularly interested in expos-
ing the way the US has used the slogan “save the woman” to “justify
American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan and to make a case
for the ‘War on Terrorism’” (Abu-Lughod 784). Gauhar’s novel flags
up a serious question: Are women’s situations in post-war Afghanistan
better than that of pre-war tribal Afghanistan? Gauhar’s question is
significant when considered in the light of Laura Bush’s statement in
2002: “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan,
women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to
music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. The fight
against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women”
(Abu-Lughod 784). Gauhar challenges Laura Bush’s statement by juxta-
posing pre- and post-war Afghanistan through past stories of the asylum
inmates and their present situation.
Most of the stories told by the asylum’s inmates feature domestic
violence suffered by Afghan women in the name of indigenous cultural
and tribal brutalities such as honour killing, rape, misogyny and the
patriarchal system of pre-war Afghanistan, a society run by conserva-
tive Afghans, ex-mujahideen and, later, by the Taliban. The story of the
schoolteacher who, on being suspected of communism, is blinded
by an imam who throws acid at him, and the tale of a daughter who
has been murdered by her own father due to the sin of running away
with a labourer, present pictures of the extreme brutality of Afghan
tribal culture. These harrowing stories highlight the anger of Afghan
citizens towards their own patriarchal tribal system under the spell of
the Taliban. Nevertheless, in the novel, Afghanistan remains a valley of
death after the American invasion of the region. Post-9/11 US brutality
is shown in the novel through the bombs that target the asylum, killing
many Afghans. Therefore, the novel not only highlights Afghanistan’s
desolate history of war waged by insiders, but also becomes a haunting
indictment of humiliation and violence fuelled by outsiders, predomi-
nantly the US Army. Post-war Afghanistan is featured in the novel as
a land inhabited by “men with no arms and no legs, children with no
eyes, women with no hair and no shame. They suckled babies who had
no mouths” (192). Gauhar contends in the novel that although the US
Army legitimised the “war on terror” as saving women from the hegem-
ony of the Taliban, they remained indifferent to the plight of women in
Afghanistan, leaving “no more space for further burials” (192).
Gauhar’s choice of an American narrator in the novel aims at present-

ing an “internal” critique of US policy in the region. Gauhar, through
the character of her American narrator, subverts what Sara Ahmed
calls “stranger danger discourses” by allowing her stranger narrator, a
Firangi, to “take on a spatial function, establishing relations of proxim-
ity”. Ahmed argues against the oversimplification of “strangerness rhet-
oric” according to which “some-bodies who simply are strangers … pose
danger in their very co-presence” in a given society (Strange Encounters 3).
In Gauhar’s novel, the whole notion of “otherness” or “strangerness”
crumbles for two reasons. Firstly, it is hard to define who belongs to the
category of “stranger” or “other”, since it is the narrator who describes
his asylum inmates as “strangers” in the above quotation, although he
is himself a stranger in Afghanistan. Secondly, being a soldier of the US
Army, the narrator is supposed to pose a danger to his Afghan inmates
by representing American forces in the region, but this does not hap-
pen. Instead, the narrator, along with other captives, strives to save
his own life in dire circumstances. He is as vulnerable to violence and
treachery as everyone else in the novel. In fact, Gauhar makes readers
empathise with the American Firangi when ties with his nation are loos-
ened and he starts assisting other Afghan captives to survive by helping
build a wall to keep bandits out, coping with sickness and disease, and
aiding Anarguli in saving her daughter’s life. He comes face to face with
the world where, though he is himself a victor, he must cope with the
terrible madness of the war. As he says:
What nags me are the things we were taught before we came to this
land, the tenets of war, the rules of engagement. I keep going over
these in my head all the time, the virtues of our coming here, the
need to liberate these people, the absolute necessity of enduring
freedom.
Enduring Freedom.
Enduring.
Freedom.
Two words which don’t mean anything to me anymore. (51)
Gauhar’s narrative, as Ellen Turner argues, tends to convey “the mes-

sage that that war is brutal and senseless for ordinary people, people
like you, the reader, no matter what nationality, gender or religion you
are” (122). This is aided by the epistolary form chosen by Gauhar in her
novel. Told through the diary entries of an American medic who aspires
to be a writer, the personal stories of different characters deconstruct a
dichotomy between victim and victor. Since Gauhar’s American narra-

tor is not presented as a typically ruthless US soldier, his letters become
a way to represent his and other characters’ internal states and to pre-
sent accounts of recent events. The American Firangi is as much a suf-
ferer as his Afghan inmates. This ambivalent relationship between the
victor and victim is the metaphor for “the deep suffering they share, the
unspoken agony of their lives” (51). In spite of the differences between
their cultures and languages, one thing that unites all the inmates is
human suffering. As the narrator says: “There are so many languages
here, and the only one I have managed to understand is the one which
speaks of fear” (15). The narrator is surprised by the fact that his own
bond with the asylum inmates is born out of sufferings that they all
share. Despite the fact that he belongs to the part of the world (the US)
that has the power to control the rest, he has now become “a part of the
process of birth and death, that I have suffered and that my suffering
has been acknowledged by strangers who have touched the centre of
my sorrow and not thought less of me for being an outsider, a stranger,
Firangi Amreeki, American Stranger” (158).
In the midst of this unspoken agony and utter hopelessness, Gauhar’s
choice of names is significant in that most of the characters tend to
assert their significance through their presence in each other’s lives irre-
spective of the boundaries between their culture, religion and civilisa-
tion. The caretaker of the asylum, Waris, whose name means inheritor,
seems to have inherited the suffering and pain of other asylum inmates.
Noor Jahan, Waris’s wife, whose name means “Light of the World”, is
described by the narrator as “mother of all mothers” because her duty
is to make sure that all “the sane and insane alike, are fed” (47–48).
Likewise Sabir, which means patience, brings fruits and food for other
people when they have lost all hope of survival despite being one-eyed
and one-legged herself. Even the mule that Sabir rides is named “Gulab
Jan, the Rose of Life” by Bulbul (55). The birth of Anarguli’s daughter,
Sahar Gul, the Rose of Sunshine, whom everyone strives to save from
death, becomes a metaphor for women’s liberation in Afghanistan.
However, the most interesting inversion is found in the name given to
the novel’s American narrator. Firangi does not serve in this valley of
death as a soldier of the US hegemonic power as his name suggests; he
also becomes a metaphor for human suffering in a war-ridden country.
Abu-Lughod’s observation about the utility of Orientalist construc-
tions of Muslim women in “war on terror” rhetoric is pertinent to
understanding the overarching concept of Gauhar’s novel. According
to Abu-Lughod, US projects such as saving Muslim women and making
“women’s (and men’s) lives better” in fact “reinforce a sense of superior-

ity … a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged” (789). Gauhar,
by giving an internal critique of US policy through the voice of her
American narrator and by deconstructing “stranger danger discourses”,
tends to challenge this arrogance, underpinned by the hegemony of US
capitalism as well as the dominant binary of “Us” and “Them”.
Maha Khan Phillips’s Beautiful from this Angle

In an interview with Bilal Ibne Rasheed about choosing the theme of
her novel, Maha Khan Phillips made the following statement:
When I was starting to put my ideas together for this novel, I remem-
ber walking into a news agency in London. There were five of the
daily newspapers out on the shelf, and four of them had negative
stories about Islam on the cover, ridiculous ones, considering that
they were the leading stories of the day. “Muslim taxi driver refuses
guide dog for being unclean”, “Muslim teacher won’t take off her
burqa even though her students don’t understand what she is say-
ing”. I decided it would be fun to turn this media obsession with
Islam on its head, and set the novel in Pakistan. Satire comes from
reality. (The News, n.p.)
Here, Phillips indubitably documents the ways in which all things

Muslim/South Asian are refracted through US Orientalism. Set in con-
temporary Pakistan, Beautiful from this Angle, presents a powerful and
necessary critique of a number of topical issues – including jihadism,
terrorism, feudalism, female oppression in the Muslim world, honour
killings, manipulation of Islam for political reasons, the active role of
NGOs in women’s emancipation and media exploitation of “war on
terror” propaganda – that dominate not only public discourses in the
West but also mainstream Pakistani and Western media in the immedi-
ate aftermath of 9/11. The novel is produced with an eye to providing
a response to what is termed as “9/11 fiction”. In so doing, the most
distinguishing feature of Phillips’s novel is the way that it foregrounds
how national and international media and organisations (NGOs) work
in unison towards the furthering of stereotypical images of Islam
and Muslims against the backdrop of 9/11 without adequately grap-
pling with the complexities inherent in Islamic cultures and Muslim
identities.
The story of Beautiful from this Angle centres on three childhood
friends: Amynah Farooqui, Henna Ali Khan and Mumtaz Malik. Amynah,
daughter of liberal and sexually licentious parents (her mother is having

an affair with a member of the National Assembly and her father is
spending time with his mistress in London), is the writer of a Karachi
magazine gossip column called “Party Queen on the Scene”. She is
also in the process of writing a novel that is described by Mumtaz as
belonging to the category of “I-am-an-oppressed-woman-who-escaped-
from-a-Muslim-country novels” (24). Like her parents, Amynah also
has a promiscuous lifestyle of drug-taking and casual sex, of which her
friend Henna disapproves. Henna is the daughter of an influential poli-
tician and feudal lord, and she has returned to Rahim Yar Khan where
her father is going to marry her off to Javaid, “the neighboring feudal
in Rahim Yar Khan and an alliance [which] will bring a lot of political
benefits [to Henna’s father]” (32). During her stay in Rahim Yar Khan,
Henna meets her childhood friend Nilofer, who is brutally abused by her
husband for not being able to provide him with an heir. Henna decides
to whisk oppressed Nilofer away from her abusive husband to a life of
dignity, comfort and freedom in Karachi. It is a coincidence that Henna’s
plan to help Nilofer coincides with hers and Amynah’s friend Mumtaz’s
project of making a documentary on oppressed women. Mumtaz is the
daughter of a drug-dealer and is portrayed as an inspiring activist who
wants to achieve something serious in her life. In her pursuit of her polit-
ical ambitions, she plans to produce a documentary entitled “A Matter
of Honor”, to be based on honour killing and violence against women.
Mumtaz also plans to sell this documentary “to the BBC” (33), thereby
winning the fame to which she has been aspiring for years. Mumtaz’s
dream seems to come true when Amynah suggests that she should use
Nilofer, a perfect victim of patriarchal oppression, for her documentary.
The three friends go to Rahim Yar Khan, Faridabad and neighbouring vil-
lages in order to film the documentary and to their great surprise CNN
agrees to air it, because they find Nilofer “amazingly photogenic. They
liked her story too, of being forced into marriage and raped etc … they
were a little disappointed though with the lack of scars on her face or any
serious trauma to her body” (66). As per Mumtaz’s plan, the documen-
tary not only wins fame for the three friends but also promises Mumtaz
an affiliation with Pakistan’s most significant political party, the Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP). Nevertheless, this affiliation also brings Mumtaz to
her tragic fate when, towards the end of the novel, she is killed during
an assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto, the chairperson of the party.
In its intense focus on violence against women, terrorism and social
repression, Phillips’s novel demonstrates the ability of contemporary
post-9/11 fiction and mainstream national and international media to
persuade and manipulate the general outlook of fear and suspicion with
regard to Muslims that has typically prevailed in the post-9/11 era. This
is illustrated in the novel by foregrounding the activities, thoughts and
feelings of the novel’s principal characters: Monty, Amynah, Henna and
Mumtaz. Monty’s reality show based on Islamic terrorists, Mumtaz’s
documentary on honour killing and Amynah’s novel written in the style
of “Muslim women misery memoirs” all say “things about Islam that
mainstream wants to hear” (Chambers, “Multi-Culti” 389). For example,
Monty receives a hefty commission – from an English friend who works
for Channel 4 in London – for filming the most popular reality show
Who Wants to Be a Terrorist. This involves a “mock Islamic terrorist train-
ing camp on the Waziristan border for a bunch of Z-list English celebri-
ties”. With the “combination of English celebrities and [a few hired] mad
mullahs” (19), the show focuses on the Islamic rituals and activities of
the jihadists as well as on their “commando moves and bomb-building
until well into the night” (9). Much lauded for the way it represents
extremists, the reality show brings hope for the team at Channel 4 that
“few of them [the mad mullahs in the training camps] will crack and
become real-life fundoos” (9). Phillips’s portrayal of the character of
Monty responds to what Petley and Richardson describe as the so-called
“practical contexts in which journalists work: commercial competition
between papers and between channels … the political expectations and
requirements of proprietors and editors … the pressure to entertain, sim-
plify and please rather than to inform, challenge and educate” (Intro, x).
In the novel, the reporting of Monty’s reality show on Channel 4 projects
a one-dimensional perspective on the Muslim community and is likely
to foster anxiety and fear within non-Muslim communities, thereby
provoking feelings of insecurity and suspicion with regard to “fundoos”.
Like Monty’s reality show, Amynah’s novel – which is inspired by
the oppressed Muslim women genre in its satirical representation of a
British-born daughter of Pakistani immigrants who is forced to return
to Pakistan to get married – is quintessential in its representation of
imperialist narratives about Muslim/Asian women. Here, Phillips uses
the girl’s internal monologues to highlight her perception of the ways
in which her freedom and liberty have been curtailed in the name of
Islamic tradition. Since the novel is still incomplete, Amynah writes
notes to herself about the details to be incorporated while revising her
first draft. Amynah’s research clearly identifies the common trends
within oppressed-women fiction:
When I announced that I would be going to uni, my father screamed

for two weeks and told me they had already found me a husband …
(Note: Research has shown that there are two types of oppressed
women – the ones who are princesses in their own countries, and
the ones who are foreigners suckered into entering a Muslim country
and are never able to leave. Oppressed women trapped in Pakistan
always come from either Birmingham or North England. Look on the
internet for some Birmingham street names). (36)
These notes to self are an interesting strategy and can be read as a cri-
tique of the bulk of post-9/11 literature that “sells” in the West as well
as of the way that writers sell indigenous problems. As Amynah, in her
gossip column, also says, these are the books “whose covers always
show pictures of women in burkas looking vulnerable and oppressed
with blazing, haunted eyes, and that are so vividly read and published
in the West” (24). Such novels succeed in the West by projecting an
image of Muslim communities with beleaguered women, thereby
perpetuating the essentialist representation of burqa-clad women that
became a significant justification for waging a “war on terror” against
Muslim countries.
Whether it is Monty’s reality show, Amynah’s unfinished oppressed-
women novel and gossip column or Mumtaz’s documentary on honour
killings, Phillips aims to extract the social meanings that these activities
and thoughts present in a post-9/11 context. These activities comment
upon what and how things have been perceived in a particular way and
draw out their relevance to the debates on Pakistan as a terrorist land.
The novel frames this through the dispute between the three friends
over Henna’s concern for Nilofer’s future once the documentary is
aired on CNN. The whole discussion centres on the multiple discourses
inscribed on the bodies of oppressed Muslim women. Portraying Nilofer
as a victim of honour killing, Mumtaz even goes to the extent of mak-
ing a fake documentary in which Nilofer is shown to be residing in a
mud hut (made of cardboard and painted by an artist whom Mumtaz
hires). Similarly, it is necessary that Nilofer should look sufficiently
exotic for CNN’s audience, thus she must have bruises (painted) on
her face. Mumtaz also insists that it is important to tell the viewers
that her violent husband has killed her. All this is foregrounded in the
novel through correspondence between three friends who are trying
to impose on each other and with their emails advance their amorous
interests, as I will explain.
In employing the narrative technique of the use of emails, significant
news clippings, extracts from Amynah’s unfinished novel and her gos-
sip columns that collectively contribute towards progressing the plot,
the novel introduces and reinforces a host of topical buzzwords, as
mentioned previously. The polylogic epistolary style of the novel not

only lends a kind of immediacy and directness to the issues foregrounded
in the novel, but it also exposes the hypocrisy and manipulative strate-
gies of local and international media when perpetuating the tropes
of oppressed women. When it dawns upon Henna and Amynah that
Mumtaz’s sole concern in filming her documentary is to win name and
fame irrespective of what happens to Nilofer after the screening of the
documentary on CNN, they try to prick Mumtaz’s conscience. Mumtaz,
however, is adamant that without showing Nilofer’s tragic fate in her
documentary, which can either be Nilofer’s murder at the hands of her
husband or her husband’s hanging on the suspicion that he has killed his
wife, the documentary won’t sell. It is at this point that Amynah’s aware-
ness of the inevitability of Nilofer’s tragic predicament and Mumtaz’s
selfish motives clash with each other, as highlighted in the following
email exchange between the three friends:
Please don’t forget the importance of the documentary. It was your

plan after all, Ames. We’ve got to film her looking scared and fright-
ened for her life. It must come across on camera that any time, soon,
she might be killed by her husband. Which will be the case, Henna,
if we leave her where she is. Remember that if you start to freak out.
Nobody needs to know that we are arranging her “disappearance”,
or that we’re being elusive in the second part of the documentary. (68)
Mumtaz’s ironic distance from Nilofer’s ultimate fate as a human being

as well as her misleading re-enactment of Nilofer’s death espouse what
Petley and Richardson describe as “pandering to readers” [in this case
viewers’] anxieties and prejudices’ (xi). Mumtaz further explains to
Amynah and Henna:
As far as the world is concerned, Nilofer will be dead, her kidnapping

arranged by her husband as a prelude to having her murdered. I have
already written the end of the documentary for Amynah to narrate.
Read below:
“Two weeks later, we returned to Rahim Yar Khan to talk to Nilifer
again. This vulnerable and brave woman was no longer in the vil-
lage. The villagers claim she was kidnapped in the night. Allah
Numani, the husband who beat, raped and tortured her, is not saying
anything.”
Then we’ll cut to a pre-filmed interview of Nilofer (with a couple
of bruises on her face) looking scared and weepy. “One day, soon, my
husband is going to kill me. If Allah is merciful, why then does he let
my husband do this to me?”
Then we’ll cut to the B roll – wide shots of Rahim Yar Khan, people
going about their business.
Narration: Was Nilofer murdered? If not, where is she? The
Pakistani government says it is doing its best to tackle honour kill-
ings, to bring the perpetrators of these acts to justice. But here, in a
small village in Punjab, one woman has lost her voice. When will
there be justice for Nilofer?
...
What do you guys think? Isn’t this brilliant? (68–69)
The whole conversation gestures towards Mumtaz’s insensitivity towards

a serious local problem, namely women’s suppression in a feudal set-up
that has continued to dominate discourses surrounding neo-Orientalist
tropes of Muslim women and the gender-based binary evident in con-
servative Muslim societies. When analysed according to a Western femi-
nist agenda, the conversation seems to articulate a response to global
feminist demands for gender equality for women such as Nilofer in
patriarchal societies. However, a consideration of Mumtaz’s callousness
towards Nilofer allows us to flesh out the complexities involved in the
effacement of female subjectivity in Third-World patriarchal contexts.
Here, I agree with Hester Eisenstein’s critique of mainstream feminist
ideology: that it has been manipulated to legitimise a Western dichot-
omy between “modern” (women’s rights) versus “traditional” (patriar-
chal suppression of women’s rights). This paradigm, Eisenstein argues,
promotes the idea that “the Islamic world is denominated by its very
nature as a part of non-modernity and therefore as part of the terrorist
threat. This rhetoric deftly folds feminism into modernity and assimi-
lates terrorism to patriarchy. For the women of the world, then, there is
a clear path: be modern, be democratic, and escape the clutches of patri-
archal terrorists” (424). According to Eisenstein’s observations, modern
women like Amynah and Mumtaz from upper-class, Westernised, liberal
families face no significant problems in leading an unapologetic and
carefree life of alcohol consumption and social gatherings. On the other
hand, “traditional” women like Nilofer become the victims of tribal and
cultural practices, such as honour killings and forced marriages, that
are often so conveniently misunderstood as Islamic practices. Nadeem
Aslam talks in his novels about such terrorising tribal activities as “small
scale 9/11s that go on everyday” (Akash Kapur n.p.). This becomes par-
ticularly poignant in the novel when Chip Johnson, a representative
from the Fox Channel, says when talking to Amynah and Mumtaz that
“in Muslim countries, terror exists everywhere. Even inside a woman’s
own home” (146). However, this appropriation of Muslim women
and communities by Johnson and indeed by Mumtaz is criticised by
Amynah who reminds Mumtaz of “what happens in other countries”
(73). Mumtaz contends that her own research on domestic violence and
women oppression shows that:
On an average, in Western countries, two women per week are killed

by a male partner or a former partner. In Britain, an incident of
domestic violence is reported to the police every minute, yet these
are only 35 per cent of the incidents that take place. Why are honour
killings so important then? I told you, it’s all this “we are Muslim
victims” bullshit. (73)
Nevertheless, the idea that deserves some unpacking here is that

this “modern”–”traditional” binary has the tendency to homogenise
attitudes towards understanding the problems Muslim women have
been facing; a more serious problem that I suggest warrants considera-
tion is the hierarchialisation of women’s status in patriarchal societies
that exacerbates the vulnerability of women, such as Nilofer in socio-
political contexts highlighted in the novel. By this I mean women from
the upper class, such as Mumtaz and Amynah, who are perceived to
be working towards the amelioration of women’s degraded position
in a misogynist society but in fact exploit Nilofer’s unprivileged situ-
ation. Women are not only the victims of male patriarchal terrorists,
such as Nilofer’s husband; they are also dehumanised and objectified
by women who claim to be their saviours. The above episode from the
novel invites us to consider a different dimension of the objectifica-
tion of women that Martha Nussbaum defines as the “denial of sub-
jectivity”. Drawing upon Nussbaum’s notion of the objectification of
women, I read the email correspondence between the three friends as an
attempt to understand Mumtaz as “the objectifier” who treats the object,
Nilofer, “as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not
be taken into account” (218). Mumtaz’s casual narration of Nilofer’s
suffering and of her possible murder by her husband gestures towards
Nilofer’s status as merely a “subject of her documentary” rather than a
human being. This dehumanisation of Nilofer rids her of her human
essence. I argue here that it is not only males who objectify women;
women also objectify women, thereby “minimiz[ing] the perception of
the individual as fully human, such as denying that their feelings and
experiences matter and having less concern when they are physically
or emotionally harmed” (Heflick and Goldenberg 598). Completely
oblivious to Nilofer’s or even her husband’s fate, Mumtaz treats them
merely as tools for her own purposes in a manner that Nussbaum terms
“the instrumental treatment of human beings” (238). In addition to
the point of women’s vulnerability within their own societies that I am
making here, manipulation of Nilofer’s situation also gestures towards
the local–global nexus in 9/11 contexts that I interrogate in this mono-
graph; “war on terror” rhetoric with regard to oppressed Muslim women
has given an enormous impetus to the agenda of poverty alleviation
and female emancipation, which Mumtaz is ambitiously pursuing in
the novel.
My brief exploration of fictional narratives by first- and second-gen-
eration writers of Pakistani origin highlights the complexities involved
in postcolonial discourses of belonging and Muslim identity. As such,
they work against the “authorised and authorising paradigms” perpetu-
ated by the production of Western fictional narratives and US public
discourses in the aftermath of 9/11. By problematising and destabilising
the “relationship between dominant and subaltern”, second-generation
writers have constructed, in different ways, a third space beyond East–
West cultural boundaries, a space termed by Roger Bromley “a space of
revaluation” (1). The vexed relationship between the dominant US and
the subaltern subcontinent in the post-9/11 world that these writers
foreground and complicate in their novels relates to the complexities
surrounding contemporary Muslim identity politics and writers’ (dis)
affiliations with the global ummah. I will analyse the global ummah in
detail in the next three chapters.
2
Responding to 9/11:
Contextualising the Subcontinent
and Beyond
In Fear Of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai discusses the birth of

Pakistan and draws our attention to “a huge and contentious schol-
arship surrounding the story of Partition, the politics that led to it,
and the bizarre geographies it produced (with East and West Pakistan
flanking an independent India from 1947–1973 when East Pakistan
succeeded in seceding from West Pakistan, giving birth to Bangladesh,
a new nation on India’s eastern borders)” (66). Appadurai’s concern
over “the bizarre geographies” becomes the starting point for Uzma
Aslam Khan’s engagement at a narrative level with her interpretation of
issues of Muslim stereotyping and “war on terror” rhetoric. Rather than
viewing 9/11 as the only marker of Muslim identity formations, Khan
links the post-9/11 reframing of Pakistani identities to the upsurge of
Islamic terrorist groups involved in sectarian conflicts within the sub-
continent and the Middle East, as well as to the Islamisation of Pakistan
from the 1970s onwards. In contrast to those second-generation writ-
ers who have focused for the most part on what has happened since
9/11, Khan’s oeuvre foregrounds pre-9/11 cultural, social, political
and historical causes that underlie the recent global stereotyping of
Muslims and Islam. This chapter explores Khan’s representations of
South Asian political history of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, primar-
ily in the novels Trespassing and The Geometry of God, which I describe
as “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction”, but also through her
prolific journalistic writings. As she says in interview: “Culture, poli-
tics, art, history, sexuality – in my writing, all are interlinked, without
my even knowing it till I’m done. Sometimes it helps to explore the
connection through imaginary tangential worlds, sometimes through
more direct means” (‘Pakistan: Women and Fiction Today’ n.p.). I argue
throughout this book that some writers have chosen to take on the
73
burden of representing Pakistani Muslims particularly in the aftermath

of 9/11. I avoid a reductive approach that would view each text as the
epitome of the burden of representation. However, the claim that much
Pakistani-affiliated fiction is political and invested in identity politics
in orientation is supported by the fact that two of the writers to whom
I devote the most attention, Khan and Shamsie, also publish polemical
non-fiction. The use of novelists’ journalistic writings and interviews
situates my interpretation of their work in terms of their stance on the
global political scenario.
Rather than focusing on Pakistani diasporic communities in the US
and the UK and their post-9/11 dilemmas, Khan unhesitatingly con-
demns Pakistan’s national and foreign policies during General Zia’s rule,
and US intervention in the internal affairs of other countries (particu-
larly Afghanistan and Iraq) that, according to her, prepared the grounds
for current perceptions of radicalised Islam in Britain and the US. Of
course, the globalisation of jihadi tendencies and the road to the post-
9/11 situation are related to internal upheavals within the subcontinent
and to changing regional and international conditions affected by US
imperialistic concerns.
I explore these contexts and connections in the first part with refer-
ence to Trespassing and The Geometry of God which are set against the
backdrop of the political and social history of Pakistan during Zia’s
regime (1979–89), in particular Zia’s national and foreign policies which
divided the whole Pakistani nation along ethnic grounds. Nevertheless,
the history of these ethnic rivalries dates back to the 1947 Partition. By
juxtaposing the ethnic riots of 1947 with those of the 1980s and 1990s,
Khan suggests that individual and collective memories of displacement
along with sectarian acrimony and ethnic violence tend to threaten
the stability of domestic space by promoting a culture of intolerance
towards (minority) ethno-nationalist identities. In the second part,
I propose an interface between the aforementioned ethnic rivalries and
sectarian conflicts within Pakistan and beyond by focusing on the way
Zia’s Islamisation of Pakistan not only divided the nation along sectar-
ian and religious lines, but also revived the concept of militant jihad
that reinforces neo-Orientalist tropes and stereotypes of violent Islam.
This in turn transformed the whole infrastructure of the Pakistani state,
including the military and education systems. The third section maps
a transition from national/regional to transnational/global contexts by
positing a nexus between the Islamisation of Pakistan in the 1970s and
1980s, crises in the Gulf region due to the First and Second Gulf Wars,
and the growth of the hard-line Islamic movement of the Taliban in
Responding to 9/11 75
Afghanistan, whilst also flagging up the repercussions of the 9/11 attacks

for Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Gulf countries. The propagation of
Islamic solidarity during Zia’s regime, informed by a paradigm of affilia-
tion with a Muslim ummah, resulted in Shia–Sunni sectarian rivalry. The
same phenomenon was happening in Afghanistan and countries of the
Middle East. Khan’s novels explore intra-Muslim sectarian violence and
show how it was manipulated by the US during the Afghan and Gulf
Wars. For the above reasons, I consider 9/11 as “unfinished business of
the Cold War” (Mamdani 13). Indubitably, US interference in internal
Arab affairs and heavy militarisation of the Gulf region furthered the
jihadi movement of al-Qaeda. Crucially, as a result of its involvement in
both Wars either directly or indirectly, Pakistan has emerged as a lead-
ing locus of terrorism in the world. Khan vehemently condemns these
features of US realpolitik. The chapter concludes with Khan’s distinc-
tive fictional representations of Pakistani female characters in a male-
dominated culture. Khan’s gendered focus aims at critiquing gender
inequality within Pakistan’s patriarchal society. But at the same time she
delineates Pakistan as a land of opportunities for all those women of all
classes who are willing to stand up for their rights. It also deconstructs
the reductive tropes of burqa-clad Muslim women that have been used
by the US to sanction its own illegal entry into Afghanistan, Pakistan
and other Muslim countries. In so doing, Khan adds new dimensions
to her writings by linking local gender discrimination to cross-cultural
gender stereotyping in the West, in the service of “war on terror” rheto-
ric. This makes her work distinctive among second-generation writers
of Pakistani origin.
Khan’s emphasis on the above nexus between the Islamisation of
Pakistan, crises in the Gulf region, and the hard-line Islamic movement
of the Taliban in Afghanistan serves to highlight the fact that despite its
active role in the US-led global “war on terror”, especially during Pervez
Musharraf’s regime (2007–08), Pakistan has continuously been criticised
for allowing terrorist sanctuaries, and for the continued recruitment and
training of terrorists in remote regions of the country. Since the Afghan
War against the Soviet Union, Pakistan has been exposed to multifari-
ous external and internal security challenges, but the 9/11 attacks had
particular consequences for Pakistan and Pakistani communities abroad.
Claire Chambers suggests that “the war on terror has had even more
cataclysmic reverberations than the terrorist strikes” (“Comparative”
122). In this context it is necessary to attend to the homeland–diaspora
connection in Khan’s novels. I would like to clarify that diaspora is not
the main focus of this chapter, but the examples of Pakistani diasporics,
which I discuss in the third section focalise the representational issues

that Khan engages. In fact, these examples primarily serve to accentu-
ate ways in which the lives of Pakistani diasporics in their respective
diasporas are informed by the social and political scenario within the
homeland. Therefore, whenever Khan introduces diasporic characters
in her works, she tends to highlight the relationship between Pakistanis
and Pakistani diasporic communities in terms of how the political sce-
nario in Pakistan affects the framing of Pakistani communities overseas
as part of a “terrifying majority” of world Muslims.1
Contending ethnic identities: perceptions of the others
As I have stated earlier, my purpose in this monograph is not to offer

any rant against Western stereotyping of (Pakistani) Muslims and Islam,
thereby positioning Pakistan largely as a victim whose problems are
all imposed on it from outside. My aim instead is to give insight into
reasons for home-grown terrorist activities that do indeed contribute to
hostile attitudes towards Islam as well as towards a post-9/11 image of
Pakistan in the West. It is with this intention that Khan steps back in
time momentarily to the 1970s to excoriate Zia’s politically motivated
Islamisation policy, which fuelled ethnic rivalries that have regularly
roiled Karachi and North Pakistan since the 1947 Partition. By juxtapos-
ing the ethnic riots of 1947 with those of the 1980s and 1990s, Khan
shows how individual and collective memories of displacement, along
with ethnic violence, tend to threaten the stability of domestic space
by promoting a culture of intolerance towards various ethno-national
identities. Trespassing (2003) illuminates the ethnic and socio-political
conundrums that Karachiites face today.
Set mainly in Pakistan, Trespassing introduces its readers to the coun-
try’s political, social and religious reconfigurations during General Zia’s
regime, along with the writer’s perspective on American attitudes dur-
ing the Gulf War. It is critical of the expansion of Islamic practices and
policies during Zia’s military tenure as well as of US interference in the
Arab world’s internal affairs during the Iran–Iraq War and later during
the First Gulf War. There are two parallel storylines in the novel. The
main story revolves around Dia and Daanish. Daanish, an Amherst
journalism student in the US, returns to Karachi for his father Shafqat’s
funeral. At the funeral he meets Dia, the daughter of an innovative
entrepreneur Riffat, who is running her family’s silk business after her
husband’s death. Daanish’s traditional mother, Anu, is now a widow
and determined to marry her son off to Nasreen. Unconsciously
following their parents’ footsteps, Dia and Daanish fall in love. A paral-
lel story features a character called Salaamat, a poor boy from a fishing
village who migrates to the big city (Karachi) and gets mixed up with
Sindhi guerrillas in their struggle for a separate homeland. Salaamat’s
affiliation to Sindhi guerrillas illuminates the ethnic and socio-political
conundrums that Karachiites face today, something that Khan links to
the wider political scenarios of the subcontinent and the Middle East
through Daanish’s experience of journalism in the US, something I will
return to in the third section below.
Set in the sprawling megalopolis of Karachi, Trespassing provides
a compelling portrait of the civil unrest that arose due to emerging
ethnic and religious nationalisms within Pakistan and to the pervasive
political upheaval during Zia’s regime.2 Zahid Hussain argues that “[t]he
dynamic of exclusion and minoritization, which had existed since the
creation of the country in various forms, was sanctified by General
Zia’s Islamization” (91). Karachi has been convulsed by ethnic con-
flicts since the early years of independence. As a result of the massive
influx of Urdu-speaking Muslim muhajir (immigrants) at the time of
the 1947 Partition, the local Sindhi population was outnumbered. The
1960s marked a second wave of domestic migration when Pakistani
Pashtun/Pathan people started migrating to Karachi for economic rea-
sons. They were later joined by Afghan immigrants in 1979. Karachi,
consequently, became a battleground for various ethnic and sectarian
groups. Unfortunately, no politicians or state representatives have ever
made any efforts to engage with the social, ethnic, sectarian and reli-
gious problems or to combat the rise of intolerance within Pakistan. In
fact, the political parties, Army and bureaucracy have always sought
to manipulate these ethnic differences in order to promote their own
narrow interests. During Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s reign in the early 1970s,
the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in Sindh championed the cause of
the Sindhi community, while the MQM supported the Urdu-speaking
Muslim muhajir community and the Muslim League Noon (Nawaz
group) favoured the Punjabi community (Baixas 3, 5).
For the reasons outlined above, Trespassing’s Riffat grumbles that
“the bloodshed began when a general ruled” (305). Riffat’s comment
gestures towards ethnic crises in Karachi that politicians – and, in this
particular novel, the dictator Zia – manipulate in order to gain political
power. Unfortunately, 64 years after the partition of India and Pakistan,
the original immigrants of Indian origin, the muhajirs, are “still identi-
fied as refugees – panahgirs”, as a villager in The Geometry of God says
(311). Trespassing foregrounds these ethnic rivalries more explicitly. For
example, a man, during a grand luncheon at an old British-established

club, says:
We will always be divided. We’ll always be Punjabi, Pathan,

Pukhtoon, Muhajir, Sindhi, or what have you. But we will never be
united. The Quaid’s [Mohammad Ali Jinnah] dream is slipping from
our fingers. Our children won’t even know he had a dream … They
will be rootless. (71)
In another place, one of the Afghan workers in Karachi grumbles:

“They call us foreigners. And what are they? Hindustani, that’s what”
(241). Similarly, Punjabis are shown to be resentful about Pathans
and Afghans: “thousands of war refugees were pouring into Peshawar
daily, pushing some of the local residents south to Karachi … If this
continued, the Pathans would drive the Punjabis out” (135). Likewise,
Punjabis think that “Sindhi separatists are imbeciles” (158).
The economic and ethnic agitation within Karachi is further reflected
through the character of Salaamat, who is presented as a representative
of the Sindhis among Punjabis and Pathans. Although he belongs to
the native fishing community of Karachi, Salaamat feels like an ethnic
stranger in his own homeland due to his migration from a village to an
urban city. He is known among other Punjabi workers as “the ajnabi.
The alien” (132). He vehemently expresses his resentment towards the
Afghan community who call him an “outsider”:
How dare they call him the outsider when it was his people who
were the original inhabitants of Karachi? All around him – the buses,
streets, shops, migrants from other provinces, and now, refugees
from Afghanistan – all were mere appendages to a place that for cen-
turies had thrived as a tranquil fishing village. But now those villages
were pushed to the periphery, and the native populations forced to
work under outsiders who claimed the city belonged to them. (133)
Due to his alienation and marginalisation in the urban area of his

native Karachi, Salaamat joins Sindhi nationalist guerrillas in their
efforts to gain a separate Sindhi homeland. Nevertheless, it is important
to remember that ethnic violence in Karachi is not a monocausal phe-
nomenon. It has its roots in historical, social and geopolitical factors
as well as in economic grievances that together result in ethnic hatred
and polarisation. Due to the economic dynamism of Karachi, the migra-
tion of Punjabis and Pathans resulted in clashes between local Sindhis,
Punjabis and Pathans, as Sindhis, who have already been swamped

by Urdu-speaking muhajirs and Gujaratis since the 1947 Partition,
were beginning to feel outnumbered by these newcomers. Salaamat’s
deep resentment towards Punjabis, Pathans and Afghans thus gestures
towards the insecurity that Sindhis feel when faced by outsiders – the
non-Sindhi population of Karachi.
Given the presence of various ethno-nationalist identities in Karachi,
as shown in the novel, Khan’s characters are “othered” within their own
spaces of comfort. Indeed, many second-generation writers of Pakistani
origin focus on the notion of familiar “others”. Shamsie and Aslam are
also interested in how a subject becomes a familiar stranger within his/
her own community or home, which is something that I discuss in detail
in my next two chapters. Whereas Shamsie and Aslam primarily discuss
this process of “othering” in diasporic contexts, Khan flags up the same
issues in the national context. She draws our attention to her characters’
obsessions with their ontological security in the historical context of
successive dislocations and migrations, either at the time of Partition
in 1947, or during the indigenous economic migration described by
Khan as a “second or another Partition” (“Fiction and War” n.p.). Fazila
and Zamindar also argue that “[t]his process of border-making – the
hot wind or garam hawa of a long partition – swept through the inner
world of familial ties, transforming both those who left and those who
remained in their ancestral homes, and displacing old ways of belong-
ing for everyone” (13). Khan suggests that nostalgia continues to play a
significant part in the construction of otherness, and subsequently, in
the construction of individual and collective identities.
Although he is speaking about diasporic contexts, Iain Chambers
points out the disturbance caused by a history of dislocation which,
according to him:
leaves multiple and uneven grooves, scars, suggestions and direc-

tions … [which] disturb the homogenous time of a unique national
identity, disrupting the onward flight of the arrow of “progress”, by
taking a step sideways into the multiple sites of coeval temporal-
ity and histories that ground us in a differentiated communality.
(Migrancy 39)
Chambers’s observations are also pertinent to the Pakistani context. He

is interested in what makes “home” possible for a migrant; this depends
upon the way the place is defined by a migrant. He argues that the
construction of home is no longer “bounded by blood and soil” or the
position of a body but extends “outwards into the vulnerable space(s)”

(Migrancy 36, 37), for example, of linguistic3 and ancestral genealogy.
Chambers’s reflections seem strikingly prescient in the case of Muslim
Pakistani national identities, which have continued to be eclipsed not
only in the wake of the different kinds of migrations mentioned above,
but also because of our obsession with ethnic identities, pre-Partition
ancestral identities and language.4
So far I have discussed how characters experience otherness due to
their ethnic affiliation. I now consider the ways in which subjects’
nostalgia for ancestral lineage make them strangers within their own
home(land). Even today, people of the subcontinent feel proud of
their genealogy, and what some perceive to be their true ethnic herit-
age. Khan accentuates this obsession with ancestral-genetic identities
in Trespassing through the character of Anu, who traces her ancestry
“hundreds of years back to the Caucasus” (52). During lunch at the
club, while sitting amidst ten intellectuals and their wives, Anu looks
around the table and remarks on the pedigree of each: “Some had two
drops Persian, others half a drop Turk. … and another had roughly one
teaspoon Arab. But none had descended from Mahmud of Ghazni, as
she had. She bore the stamp of the tribe with pride: the clear, fair com-
plexion and the bloom on her cheeks” (70). Recalling his wife’s pride in
her ancestry, the doctor also says:
[I]t was pathetic how people grasped at anything to prove they car-
ried foreign blood. And since the foreigners – from the Central Asians
to Macedonians, Arabs and Turks – were conquerors, it was the half-
teaspoon of conqueror’s blood that made people like Anu gloat over
their pedigree. Everyone here has a master–subjugator complex. No
one takes pride in being a son or daughter of this soil. (53)
Both ancestral and ethno-nationalist identities represent ghosts of the

past that continue to make their presence felt in the memories of the
people of Pakistan and India. Khan shows her characters to be the victims
of a nostalgia that ultimately becomes a part of their collective memories.
It is important to consider the nature of the relationship that these
ghosts of the past establish with history, as well as with the present.
Eng and Kazanjian’s discourse on the understanding of “loss” is use-
ful for exploring the tensions between past and present that Khan
seeks to address in her novels. Using Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the
Philosophy of History” as the basis for their study, Eng and Kazanjian
suggest that “by engaging in ‘countless struggles’ with loss”, a subject
might be able to establish “an ongoing and open relationship with the
past – bringing its ghosts and spectres, its flaring and fleeting images
into the present” (4). By bringing the past to his/her memory, a subject
develops a relationship with the past that is “creative” and “active”
rather than “reactive”. However, this future-oriented relationship hap-
pens only when the question “‘What is lost?’ … slips into the question
‘What remains?’” because this is the only way to “depathologize those
attachments” that otherwise hinder the subject’s progression into the
future. As soon as the subject’s attention is brought to this latter ques-
tion, it “generates a politics of mourning that [is] … prescient rather
than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solip-
sistic, militant rather than reactionary”. What Eng and Kazanjian in fact
suggest is that the “pervasive losses” of modern and postmodern ages
(and with regards to my work, I would add postcolonial contexts) need
to be “engaged from the perspective of ‘what remains’” (2, 3).
With this in mind, I argue that Trespassing features a double take on
the paradigm of loss similar to the one suggested by Benjamin (who
provides the basis for Eng and Kazanjian’s work): “one version moves
and creates, the other slackens and lingers” (Eng and Kazanjian 2, 3). In
Trespassing, Anu’s reflections on her ancestral history, which has been a
source of great pride for her, gestures towards her past as “an inexora-
ble fixity” (2). In other words, Anu’s nostalgia about her Mahmud-of-
Ghazni-lineage, alongside her pride in modesty, clearly exemplifies her
failure to adapt to the modern and progressive lifestyle that her husband
and son expect from her. Thus, despite the fact that Anu fulfils her roles
as a dutiful wife and a caring mother, her husband Shafqat keeps drift-
ing away from her. Her relationship with her husband has always been
like that of an intellectual subordinate as “he never discussed anything
he read with her” (78). Knowing that she will never change and wear a
bathing suit, he taunts the modesty that Anu takes pride in, consider-
ing it a gift of her great lineage, despite his acknowledgment that “If
she were the changing type, he would not have married her” (63).
I would argue that Shafqat’s comment about Anu’s unchanging nature
and modesty reflects his (male) double standards about gender within
Pakistani society; the extent to which women can be progressive still
depends on what roles patriarchy imposes on them. As he says to Riffat:
“he wouldn’t be the one to stay at home with the children, or attend to
her phone calls or arrange her meetings. Never. That was her job. His was
to fight for freedom” (423). Therefore, his expectation that Anu should
be more progressive accentuates his own hypocritical double standards.
Anu remains excluded from the adventures that the doctor and Daanish
have together. To some extent, she remains fixed under the burden of
her lineage, which does not allow her to change and accept the approach
towards life that her husband and son seem to expect from her. Anu’s
reluctance to accept a modern lifestyle alienates her from her husband
and son. Hence Anu, unlike Riffat, becomes a symbol of Benjamin’s
second version of loss, which tends to slacken and linger.
There are, however, many characters of the same generation in Khan’s
novels who engage with their “pervasive losses” from a more creative
“perspective of what remains” (Eng and Kazanjian 2, 3). Riffat, for
example, inculcates a positive attitude in her daughter Dia and encour-
ages her to live her life according to her own will, despite Riffat’s own
past misfortunes, which include the breakup with her lover Shafqat and
the death of her husband Mansoor. Likewise, Salaamat’s eventual loss of
his ethno-nationalist identity gestures towards a much-needed creative
and active relationship with the past. In other words, his pervasive loss,
or melancholia, “acts toward the future” (Khanna n.p.). Khan portrays
Salaamat as an upholder of Sindhi nationalist identity at the beginning
of the novel. His attachment to his land and ethnic identity is the result
of a series of formative personal experiences. For example, his child-
hood resentment against the Korean fishermen, his anger towards other
Afghan and Punjabi migrants who deem him a stranger in his own
land, and his struggle for survival in the alienating city of Karachi col-
lectively revive his sense of ethnic identity as a native Sindhi who has
been forced to live like a stranger in his homeland. This obsession with
Sindhi identity motivates him to join Sindhi guerrillas who unhesitat-
ingly spill the blood of innocent people for the sake of the recogni-
tion of their identity in the form of a separate Sindhi land. However,
the murder of Dia’s father’s at the hands of Sindhi separatist freedom
fighters marks a turning point in Salaamat’s life. He rejects the violent
nationalism of the Sindhi guerrillas and discards his Sindhi nationalist
identity. He realises that “You can belong to the land, instead of forc-
ing it to belong to you” (375). Salaamat’s changed perception about
his ethno-nationalist identity as a result of the guerrillas’ allegiance to
violence blurs the boundaries between individual and national loss,
private and public grief, which ultimately informs his own understand-
ing of the escalation of violence and its repercussions for his homeland,
Karachi. Khan knits together the public and the personal, historically
contextualising her characters’ crises. The narrative also moves between
external and internal narrativisation in order to open up gaps between
her characters’ own understandings of events and the meanings that
her readers can decode.
Here Sara Ahmed’s argument of the effects of migrations and displace-

ment on a subject’s sense of belonging remains relevant. Ahmed sug-
gests that “[t]he experience of leaving home in migration is … always
about the failure of memory to make sense of the place one comes to
inhabit, a failure that is experienced in the discomfort of inhabiting a
migrant body, a body that feels out of place” (Strange Encounters 91). In
Trespassing, Daanish – a muhajir in Karachi who moves to the US – fails
to comprehend the worlds he inhabits after experiencing this double
displacement. However, the story is framed around Daanish’s life in
such a way that, through his experience of living as a displaced person,
he provides a critique of the reductive aspects of both American and
Pakistani nationalisms. His confrontation with US nationalism during
the First Gulf War, whilst studying journalism, opens his eyes towards
this so-called land of freedom. However, at the same time he cannot
help but appreciate the natural beauty of his campus, in the same
way that he always admires the beauty of the sea in Pakistan. Despite
Daanish’s failure to admit his feelings for the US, Dia “could read his
eyes well enough to know there was magic there for him too. And so
she was beginning to understand what he meant when he said he was
divided” (300). The effects of repeated displacements on Daanish can
be understood by his reflections upon his own life. While talking to
Dia, he ponders: “He wished he could tell her that: I don’t know what
I feel any more. About anything. Love. War. Death. Home. All mere
headlines. He couldn’t touch or string them together” (346).
These tropes of uprooting and rerooting that percolate through
Khan’s writings mimic the varying spaces that she has herself had to
negotiate as a result of her family’s migration. Through her characters,
Khan arguably universalises her personal experiences. As she says,
“[p]artition is both ever present and an obstacle [I] must navigate in
order to find [my] own story and articulate [my] own place in the world
as a definitively post-Partition Pakistani” (“Deep” 173–185). This gener-
ates Khan’s interest in “how the maps of so much of the world are still
being drawn by those who do not suffer the consequences of their draw-
ings”. According to her, the maps of free Pakistan and India were drawn
by the British, “with no consideration to the people affected by them,
following no natural markers, cultural, or geographical. Unsurprisingly,
they produced communities which continue today to feel displaced,
and who nurse a profound sorrow that the land is still being shaped
from without” (”Pakistan: Women and Fiction” n.p.).
With reference to the political history of the subcontinent, Khan is
also interested in the “collective guilt that South Asians find difficult to
confront” (Shamsie, And The World Changed 9). As Susan Sontag argues,
“[a]ll memory is individual; irreproducible it dies with each person.
What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulat-
ing: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened”
(Khan, “Fiction and War” n.p.). Khan claims that her own experiential
memory as a South Asian is collective as well as individual. As she says:
“What I know is public history … The new homeland has not lived up
to its promise. The past is forever. The present is temporary. Nostalgia
and despair have erased faith in tomorrow” (“Fiction and War” n.p.). By
knitting together the public and the personal, the past and the present,
Khan tends to universalise not only her personal experiences of the his-
tory of Partition, but also the experiences of all those in Pakistan who
are nostalgic about their pre-Partition past. Zia’s national and foreign
policies further deepened the cleavages that had existed among eth-
nic and sectarian nationalities within Pakistan since 1947. According
to Khan, during Zia’s rule, the line between “private and public was
scratched with a hard, angry fist, just as all lines were: between men and
women, faith and reason, worship and blasphemy, west and east. Zia’s
legacy is a dichotomous world” (“Sublime and Sensuous” n.p.).
Khan’s comment can be read as an allusion to Fredric Jameson’s
hypothesis that “national allegory” characterises “third-world litera-
ture”. In “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”,
Jameson defines “all third-world texts [as] necessarily … allegorical, and
in a very specific way: they are to be read as what [he] will call national
allegories” (69). Jameson further argues that in Third-World texts, unlike
First-World literature, “the story of the private individual destiny is
always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world
culture and society” (69). Since there is no split between private and pub-
lic in the Third-World texts, “the telling of the individual story and the
individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious
telling of the experience of the collectivity itself” (85). Jameson’s formu-
lation of this hypothesis is emphatically dismissed by Aijaz Ahmad who
not only considers the hypothesis homogenising but also argues that
it is based on the rhetoric of otherness. Ahmad is particularly sceptical
about Jameson’s oversimplified reduction of “nation” and “collectivity”
in which “the enormous cultural heterogeneity of social formations
within the so-called Third World is submerged within a singular iden-
tity of ‘experience’” – the experience of colonialism and imperialism as
Jameson describes it (104). On the basis of Ahmad’s critique of Jameson’s
hypothesis, Khan’s novels Trespassing and The Geometry of God can be
seen to pose an important question: “Are ‘nation’ and ‘collectivity’ the
same thing?” (109). Following Ahmad, I argue that through characters’

critical affiliation to their ancestral genetic lineage and to various sectar-
ian and religious creeds, Trespassing and The Geometry of God respectively
provide rebuttals of Jameson’s oversimplified reduction of notions of
nation and collectivity.
The Geometry of God features 1970s and 1980s Pakistan, when the
CIA was pouring millions of dollars into the country so as to combat
Russian forces in Afghanistan. Khan’s main focus in the novel is Zia’s
regime when, as military dictator, he was gaining power on a platform
of Islamic orthodoxy. At the heart of the story, we encounter Khan’s
female protagonist Amal, the strong-minded, sensuous and adventur-
ous granddaughter of an evolutionist Zahoor. Accompanying her grand-
father Zahoor on a dig, Amal grows up to be a palaeontologist who, by
developing revolutionary theories about mammalian evolution in the
region, explores the vexing relationship between religion and reason.
She also becomes her younger sister Mehwish’s eyes, to comprehend
the realities of the visual world for her. Mehwish, who was blinded in
childhood, befriends Noman, the son of a creationist politician, and
develops a unique relationship with the physical world. As his father’s
secretary, Noman’s job is to use the Qur’an to prove scientific laws false.
Bound by familial duty, Noman experiences conflicts between reason
and faith whilst working on revisionist texts that aim to remove all
references to Newton, Archimedes and Einstein.
In the novel, the Party of Creation allegorically alludes to Zia’s efforts
to Islamise the whole Pakistani society under the banner of the Muslim
ummah. This, in the novel, is reflected through the party’s slogan “Islam
unites us all”. However, due to its leanings towards religious orthodoxy
and the propagation of a sacred/secular divide by purging evolutionary
theories from the school syllabus, the Party’s effort to unite the whole
Pakistani nation under the umbrella of the Muslim ummah utterly fails.
Instead, it reinforces the clash between religious and secular identities,
between Shia and Sunni and between other ethnic nationalities, such as
Afghans and muhajir or Sindhis. Zia’s Islamisation phenomenon, which
was meant to unify various ethnic, religious and sectarian groups, indu-
bitably blurs the boundaries between private and public conflicts, and
between individual and national memories. But this merging of indi-
vidual and collective cannot simply be reduced to the category of “the
nation” or an “experience of colonialism and imperialism” as Jameson’s
hypothesis suggests. I argue instead that during Zia’s rule, collective
identities were informed by an individual’s affiliation to a particular
class, caste, religious community, political party and village. Therefore,
in The Geometry of God, the Party of Creation’s slogan that “Islam unites
us all” refers to a collective identity, but one that transcends experiences
of colonialism and imperialism. In the novel, individual and collective
experiences are foregrounded on the basis of subjects’ affiliation to a
particular religious community, for example Shia, Sunni and Wahhabi
or religious creed.
Trespassing foregrounds such affiliations through an individual’s affili-
ation to ancestral/genealogical ethnicities – for example Anu’s pride in
her ancestral genetic lineage – which are collective, but have nothing to
do with the category of nation or the experience of colonialism/impe-
rialism. Similarly, this collectivity can also be informed by one’s affilia-
tion to secularist or fundamentalist ideology, as Shafqat says about the
President’s measures: “Why else is he suddenly supporting the Islamic
groups? Why else are all the liberals in exile or in jail?” (71). Fazila and
Zamindar argue that “memory is a complex phenomenon that reaches
out far beyond what normally constitutes an historian’s archive” (14).
In The Geometry of God, Khan proposes that the people of the sub-
continent are frozen in their past, but that the past is simultaneously
embedded in homogenised and rigid binaries of secular and religious,
ethnic and national, ancestral and modern. The complexity of varying
affiliations makes it difficult for people of the subcontinent to accept
the plural reality of their society. This is why Ahmed describes home not
as exterior but “interior to embodied subjects” (Strange Encounters 91).
Khan contends: “Pakistan has wedged itself between Arab and Indian
but as long as it denies the multireligious and multicultural skeleton of
its peculiar limb, it will limp” (“Fiction and War” n.p.). In The Geometry
of God, Noman, while passing by a tea stall, listens to conversations
between people who are nostalgic about “the golden past” and com-
ments that “this is the point at which the rich, the middle class, and the
poor all meet: the present is dangerous, the past was glorious. It’s our
jammed intersection”. Noman ponders: “When you’re not illuminated
by history, you’re encumbered by it” (79). Noman’s reference to history
cannot simply be summed up as a neo-conservative narrative of colo-
nial experience. These historical references include both experiences of
Partition and experiences of ethnic and collective ancestral histories.
Given the complex and fairly precarious identity politics in the
sprawling megalopolis of Karachi discussed above, it is necessary to
consider that “[t]he question of the other, [has] always [been] the ques-
tion of the stranger, the outsider, the one who comes from elsewhere
and who inevitably bears the message of a movement that threatens to
disrupt the stability of the domestic scene” (Chambers, Migrancy 35).
The political and social situation of Pakistan is exemplary of Chambers’s

concept of “strangerness” that tends to threaten the stability of a
domestic scene and can be understood at the levels of individual and
collective consciousness. Daanish – a stranger and a bearer of “the mes-
sage of a movement” – meets Dia and disrupts her stable life within
domestic space:
In that other place of his, which he said was just the same, did
weather get in the way of love? She was beginning to think like
that. In her mind, phrases were increasingly punctuated with in this
country, or, in other countries. She’d never done that before. This
had always been the only place she knew, loved, and wanted to be
immersed in. It was Nini who’d dreamed of that other. Not her. (300)
But the fact is that “she was getting entangled in aspects of that faraway
world [that] Daanish reluctantly shared with her” (300). Dia, who gives
Daanish’s life a “direction”, is herself falling apart as the “opposite was
happening to her” (301).
In terms of collective consciousness, Ahmed, whilst invoking Iain
Chambers’s theory of strangerness, tends to frame the figure of the
stranger “at the level of governmentality, viewing it as ‘the “origin” of
the very question of national identity’”. Ahmed poses an interesting
question: “how do we live together, as one or many (the strategic ques-
tion of monocultural or multicultural government policy)? Or even,
who is the ‘we’ of nation if ‘they’ are here to stay?” (101) Ahmed, in
her question, draws our attention to the ensuing nexus between state
policies and the figure of the stranger. Pakistan has exemplified the
problematic highlighted by Ahmed ever since its inception. The roots of
muhajir–Pathan clashes can be traced back to the 1960s, which saw the
first ethnic riots in Karachi and determined the future course of ethnic
politics in urban Sindh. Khan flags up the problematic in Trespassing
through the conversation between Daanish’s uncle and other visitors
at Daanish’s house: “It’s the Punjabis who are being made to pay. We’re
going to be driven out. I’m thinking of taking my family back to Lahore.”
Another person interferes and says: “‘Rubbish … It’s the Muhajirs. How
many of us are in prominent positions? The quota system must end’ …
‘You all control Karachi!’ came the bellowing response” (158). The novel
contextualises the ethnic riots of 1990s Karachi in relation to the 1947
Partition, the ensuing six decades of ethnic conflicts, and state policies
during Bhutto’s and Zia’s regimes. The introduction of a quota system
for jobs and admissions by Bhutto’s government aggravated the conflict
between muhajirs and other ethnic groups of Pakistan, as muhajirs

feared losing their jobs and socio-economic status. Equally, during Zia’s
regime, muhajirs “perceived the Punjabi–Pathan nexus in urban Sindh
as detrimental to their interests”, particularly in the absence of ethnic
leadership. For them, “the right-wing political parties, which had ear-
lier represented the Mohajirs of urban Sindh, had overtly and covertly
joined the Punjabi-Pathan-dominated system; the PPP represented
the interests of rural Sindh, and the other parties were divided along
regional lines”. Under the circumstances, muhajirs, who never identi-
fied themselves on the basis of race or nationality and were always
“supportive of Pakistani nationalism” instead of regional nationalism,
were forced to identify on ethnic lines (see Ahmar 1031–1048). It is in
this context that Khan’s fiction repeatedly supports Ahmed’s claim that
any encounter with a stranger “reopen[s] the prior histories of encounter
that violate and fix others in regimes of difference” (Strange Encounters 8).
I discuss the violent effects of Zia’s national and foreign policies on
Pakistani society in the next two sections.
Pakistan Islamised: the fear of small numbers
In order to understand ways in which Zia’s state policy to Islamise the

country infused conservatism in Pakistani society, we first need to con-
sider how Zia’s national and foreign policies were based on paradoxical
strategies that resulted in a culture of intolerance. Zia, on the one hand,
tried to create a unitary national (Pakistani) identity using Islam as the
unifying factor and, on the other, negated the multi-ethnic and plural
reality of the society by promoting discrimination between Shias and
Sunnis, religious and secular-minded people, and other minorities such
as Ahmadis. In this respect, Zia’s pedagogical and pragmatic insistence
on a state-promoted national identity (an Islamised Pakistani-ness)
contradicted his own policies in two ways. Firstly, Zia’s decision to
accommodate Afghan muhajirs was informed by the slogan that “Islam
unites us all”, which implies a peaceful relationship between Afghani
immigrants and other ethnic groups within Pakistan. However, the
influx of Afghan mujahideen in Pakistan – which Zia allowed as a gesture
of Muslim brotherhood – exacerbated ethnic riots in Karachi. Secondly,
Afghan mujahideen brought with them a Kalashnikov culture and Islamic
extremism, which led to what is often described as the Talibanisation of
Pakistan and is also responsible for the multi-faceted violence that regu-
larly roils Karachi and North Pakistan. Zia’s Islamisation policy, as well
as his insistence on the paradigm of Islamic solidarity/affiliation with
a Muslim ummah, evoked a “disturbing proximity … between ethnic

identities, often constituted as ‘nations’, and ‘ethnic cleansing’: between
‘domestication’ and ‘extermination’” (Chambers, Migrancy 33). Khan
foregrounds this disturbing proximity between Islamic extremists and
liberalists, and ethnic and sectarian identities, in The Geometry of God.
In The Geometry of God, the Party of Creation allegorically repre-
sents the Islamic parties (mainly Jamaat-e-Islami) during Zia’s regime
that enforced Nizam-e-Mustafa (the Islamic System) at state level. This
involvement of religion in governance and policy making during Zia’s
regime proved cataclysmic for sectarian and ethno-national identities,
due to the government’s affiliation with varying Islamic theological
creeds, and also because of the government’s religious leanings. It is
important to mention here that Zia was not the first person to have
sought to promote Islam; Bhutto also embraced Islamic ideals of
governance, declared Islam as the state religion, introduced Arabic in
school curriculums, prohibited alcohol and gambling, strengthened
the country’s relation with Arab states and declared Ahmadis as con-
stitutionally non-Muslims (Talbot 104). This measure – the oppression
of Ahmadis – reached its climax in 1986 due to the promulgation of
the Blasphemy Law, which prohibited Ahmadis from identifying as
Muslims.5 Similarly, Afghan mujahideen who had taken refuge in the
northern areas of Pakistan tried to impose so-called orthodox Islam in
the name of shariah, in conjunction with the Pakistani Taliban; this,
in turn, became a source of conflict between moderate and secular-
minded people in the country. The quota system has been another
element contributing to building tensions in the region, as discussed
earlier with reference to Trespassing. The resentments of Sindhis towards
Punjabis, or muhajirs towards Pathans and Afghans, grew regardless of
Zia’s ideology that Islam unites us all. I will now examine ways in which
Khan’s The Geometry of God considers Zia’s Islamic revivalist project and
his extremist religious establishment as a precursor of clashes between
Islam and secularism.
In The Geometry of God, in spite of the Party of Creation’s effort to
“put Pakistan’s youth on the True Path” (73), the younger genera-
tion, represented by Amal, Mehwish and Noman, is shown to be torn
between intellectual pursuits and religious obscurantism, demonstrat-
ing a clear split between religious and secularist people. Noman’s father,
Mirza Inayat Anwar, and Amal’s and Mehwish’s grandfather, Zahoor,
accentuate this clash between Islamic extremists and liberals during
Zia’s regime. The Geometry of God ironically replicates Zia’s efforts to
Islamise Pakistani society through Noman’s father’s Party of Creation,
which is founded on “the golden rules of conduct set for us by our

great law-giver, the Prophet of Islam” (35). Realising that “we are living
in dangerous times”, members of the party “have successfully banned
obscenity and established shariat courts and an Islamic educational
system” (74–75). Noman’s father clarifies the rationale behind all such
efforts by his party: “The young Pakistani is a cultural freak. … His reli-
gion is whimsy. He has no concept of Al Sirat al Mustaqim, the straight
path. He is a split. A small wind pulls them. People talk of brain drain
when youth leave this country, what about the brain drain when they
stay?” (75). Hussain corroborates that the late 1970s was the time when
a brand of pan-Islamism was promoted in the country “that would free
Pakistan from perceived western, and particularly American, cultural
and political influences” (21). In the novel, Noman’s father also says:
“We were talking about Islam, and what is to be done about the secular
elements infiltrating Muslim minds today. In this cultural war, we need
a defence” (101).
Zia’s Islamic reforms also transformed the educational system of
Pakistan, which is reflected in the novel through the mission of the
Party of Creation. As Noman’s father says: since “[t]here’s no marriage
between faith and reason. Only adultery” (101), the Party of Creation
( Jamaat-e-Pedaish) takes up a “mission of introducing an educational
system in keeping with the spirit of Islam” because “[e]verywhere you
look, pornography, obscenity, women in sports and advertising, boys
and girls together!” (23). He insists that his party aims to save the
Pakistani youth “from foreign influences – like science! Like films!” (23)
because Pakistan is facing dangerous times. Moreover, the Academy
of Moral Policy, called Akhlaq, “prescribe[s] ways to relieve young
minds of maghrib za’dagi, westernisation” (89). In her novel, Khan also
criticises the measures taken by Zia’s government to reform syllabuses;
school syllabuses were purged of evolutionary theories and any refer-
ences to Darwin.6 To foreground this divide between Islam and secu-
larism, Khan categorises her young characters as victims of the clash
between scientific reason and religious obscurantism, Islamisation and
Westernisation, and faith and desire. As Noman says to Zahoor: “Do you
know that in public I argue for Aba, while in private I argue for you? I’ve
been batting for both sides. Now I want to bat for neither. I don’t want
to be in any game” (125).
Reformulating the clash between Islam and secularism as well as
between faith and reason, Khan suggests an intersection between the
religious and the secular, faith and reason, and spiritual and physical
planes in her novel. In one episode, Amal tells Mehwish that the best
way to know God is through Khayal and Zauq. “Khayal means a thought,
or an image … the seat of intelligence … Zauq is taste. Joy.” Amal even
acknowledges that Zauq “is even lovelier than Khayal because … It’s
physical. Not abstract. To understand, first you need a mortal” (181).
On the other hand, Khan’s rebuttal of the religious orthodoxy that char-
acterised Pakistan’s infrastructure during Zia’s reign is reflected through
Zahoor’s scientific, critical and unorthodox mindset, and his dream of
a modern Pakistan. In this context, The Geometry of God can be seen
as a critique of Zia’s manipulation of Islam for the furtherance of his
political aims. Zahoor’s dream of a modern Pakistan is addressed in the
novel through the trope of palaeontology that represents “intellectual
endeavour”, “newness” and the battle between science and “religious
obscurantism”. As Ananya Jahanara Kabir argues, “Zahoor’s humorous
response to the thorny issue of Pakistani identity – Pakicetus is the real
whale, and we are real Pakistanis! – springs from his command over
knowledge production, a gift he passes on to his granddaughter Amal”
(“Deep Topographies” 180). His lectures on philosophy, religion and sci-
ence emphasise a more inclusive view of life and rebut the monolithic
Islam that Zia promoted. Amal’s reference to Khayal and Zauq as the
best means to know God gestures towards an independent thinking and
intelligence that Zahoor expects in the novel from his granddaughter’s
generation, who represent Pakistan’s youth.
Zia’s Islamic revivalist project proved to be an inherent contradiction,
not only for the Islamic and secularist divide within the country, but
also for various sectarian groups. Zia’s affiliation to Sunni Islam –
mainly the Jamaat-i-Islami that gave theological sanction to his state
policies – aggravated the Shia–Sunni conflicts. When Zia came to power
he tried to promote the Sunni version of Islam in Pakistan due to his
close ties with the Arab states, in particular Saudi Arabia. As Syed Vali
Nasr also argues, sectarianism in Pakistan is “organized and militant
religious-political activism, whose specific aim is to safeguard and
promote the socio-political interests of the particular Muslim sectar-
ian community”. Therefore, to Nasr, sectarianism in Pakistan has its
own “discourse of power which promises empowerment of a particular
sect” (quoted in Haqqani 75). Invoking Benedict Anderson’s concept of
nationalism as an imagined constructed identity, Muhammad Qasim
Zaman argues that sectarian identities in Pakistan have also been
“constructed and redefined through a process of political imagining”.
Although Shia–Sunni differences have existed for centuries, “the form
of sectarian identity that has emerged in Pakistan over the last several
decades is relatively modern and new” (quoted in Haqqani). Given Zia’s
failed efforts to use religion as a cohesive force to combat sectarian and

ethnic polarisation, Ahmed’s argument remains relevant: “there are
always encounters with others already recognised as strangers within,
rather than just between, nations” (Strange Encounters 88). According to
Ahmed, imagining the nation as a “purified space” means denial of all
the differences within that space; consequently, as a nation, one can
identify or assert one’s identity as a homogenous group. According to
this proposition, Zia’s effort to unite the whole Pakistani community
under the umbrella of Islamic ummah (or what can be described as
Islamic nationalism) should have resulted in the eradication of sec-
tarian and ethnic differences. But this hardly seems to be the case in
Pakistan. Anu’s husband, in Trespassing, also gestures towards this split
between sacred and secular in his comment about the president’s meas-
ures: “Why else is he suddenly supporting the Islamic groups? Why
else are all the liberals in exile or in jail?” (71). Zia’s forced Islamisation
has resulted in a culture of intolerance in which various sectarian and
ethno-nationalist groups started to emerge not only as strangers to each
other, but also as threats to each other’s survival.
I will now consider the Islamisation of Pakistan in a broader geo-
graphical context, because Zia’s rule marks an interesting evolution of
an Islamic cultural nationalism into a transnational pan-Islamic ideol-
ogy. The Islamic reassertion in Pakistan is not an isolated story. It grew
simultaneously with the internationalisation of jihad in Afghanistan
during the Soviet occupation. Two events that had a profound effect on
the rise and growth of sectarian conflict in Pakistan were the Iranian
Revolution (1979) and the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad (1979–1989).
Zia’s military regime propagated Sunni Islamic ideology, which was a
source of agitation for the Shia minority in Pakistan. After the Islamic
Revolution in Iran in 1979, Iran encouraged and financially assisted
Pakistani Shia groups to raise their voice against Zia. Zia, in response,
invited Saudi Arabia to support Pakistani Sunni sectarianism. In order
to understand intra-Muslim sectarian violence, it is necessary to con-
sider Pakistan’s relationship with other Muslim countries, particularly
Iran, Saudi Arabia and Middle East countries. When Iraq’s dictator,
Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monar-
chies supported him as a defender of Sunni Arab interests in the face
of Shia Persian threats. Although Pakistan played a conciliatory role
during the Iran–Iraq War, Pakistan’s relationship with Iran remained
tense as it retained close ties with Saudi Arabia and Arab Gulf allies
such as Kuwait at a time of conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
This alliance between Sunni-dominated states led to large-scale pan-
Islamisation attempts by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, as well
as by Libya and Iraq, to export Sunni Islam to other parts of the Muslim
world. It is important to note that these Shia–Sunni conflicts have been
exacerbated by US interference in Muslim states. For example, during
the Afghan War, Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states, with US sup-
port, provided billions of dollars to Pakistan in order to train Afghan
guerrillas for the Soviet–Afghan War, which was fought under the ban-
ner of Islamic ideology. However, the US changed its policy towards
mujahideen after the Afghan War. Madrassas (Islamic seminaries) for the
training of mujahideen in Pakistan during Zia’s regime have produced
targets for the US Army since the Soviet–Afghan War, as some radicals
trained in these morphed into al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups that
are currently confronting the West. I will return to these global links in
the third section of this chapter.
The aforementioned turmoil in the external regional environment,
particularly the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the Islamic rev-
olution in Iran, galvanized the Islamic revivalist movement in Pakistan.
The most damaging symbolic influence for the Pakistani Army and
Pakistan as a whole was the country’s involvement in the Soviet–Afghan
War. As Hussain says:
The situation in Afghanistan provided inspiration to a whole genera-

tion of Pakistani Islamic radicals who considered it their religious
duty to fight the oppression of Muslims anywhere in the world. It
gave new dimension to the idea of jihad, which till then had only
been employed by the Pakistani state in the context of mobilizing
the population against the arch rival – India. The Afghan war saw the
privatization of the concept of jihad. (21)
The whole infrastructure of the country was altered to suit a purely

Islamic view of the nation and the world based on shariah and teach-
ings of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Brigadier Syed A.I. Tirmizi also
observes that “[t]he slogan Nizam-i-Mustafa, a recipe for the eradication
of all ills from our society, gained wide popularity in the country” (29).
As a result of Zia’s own involvement with Tablighi Jamaat (Society for
spreading faith), not only was “the ISI’s training … integrated with the
teaching of Islam” but “25 to 30 per cent of the officers had Islamic
fundamentalist leanings … Many young officers turned to religion for
solace and became born-again Muslims” (Hussain 17–21). Islamic train-
ing and philosophy was made compulsory at the Command and Staff
College, as Zia believed that “the professional soldier in a Muslim army,
pursuing the goals of a Muslim State, cannot become “professional” if
in all his activities he does not take on ‘the colour of Allah’” (qtd in
Hussain 19). As a result of this military involvement in religion, Zia

came to be known as Islam ka Sipahi (soldier of Islam), which high-
lighted his role in the Muslim ummah; his involvement in Afghan jihad
testifies to his Islamic leanings.
Chambers illustrates that “in a world in which the willingness to
fight, kill and ultimately, die, for an abstraction called ‘country’ or
‘nation’, or even more precise ethnic locality or theological creed, the
social, economic, religious and political registers that constituently
configure a sense of belonging and ‘home’ remain vehemently in place”
(”Stranger” 33). In her novels Trespassing and The Geometry of God,
Khan highlights this obsession among Pakistanis to fight for multiple
abstractions either in the form of religious or theological creeds, or in
the form of ethnic or sectarian identities (“Letter to Barack Obama”
n.p.). This obsession has given rise to a plethora of home-grown ethnic
and militant groups; some of which in later years became the breeders
of violent jihadi culture in Pakistan. Islamisation and Talibanisation in
the northern areas of Pakistan were the result of the emergence of such
groups in Pakistan, as I will discuss in the next section.
Geography of terror: the national–transnational–global

nexus
Whilst firmly located within the broader context of the major social,
cultural and political upheavals taking place across the Muslim world,
this section maps a transition from regional to global contexts by linking
the political history of the subcontinent to the Middle East since the late
1970s, in order to situate the contemporary Muslim world – specifically
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Middle Eastern countries – in a global context.
Following Arjun Appadurai’s compelling explanation of ethnic strife and
its relation to global unrest, I read Khan’s novels as an exploration of
the dynamics of stereotyping Muslims following 9/11 and “the ways in
which global, regional, national, and local spaces enter into relationships
of replication and repercussion” (93). I argue that one of the major foci
in Khan’s novels is to contextualise local grievances in relation to global
settings. By linking the ethnic and sectarian violence within Pakistan in
the 1970s and 1980s with intra-Muslim Shia–Sunni and Arab–Persian
strife in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, Khan draws upon those relations
that exemplify a “geography of anger”. As Appadurai observes:
The geography of anger is not a simple map of action and reaction,

minoritization and resistance, nested hierarchies of space and site,
neat sequences of cause and effect. Rather, these geographies are the
spatial outcome of complex interactions between faraway events and
proximate fears, between old histories and new provocations … The
geography of anger is produced in the volatile relationship between
the maps of national and global politics (largely produced by official
institutions and procedures) and the maps of sacred national space
(produced by political and religious parties). (Fear 100)
Spanning three decades, although all written after 9/11, Khan’s nov-
els similarly highlight relationships between national, regional and
global conflicts, and their repercussions for contemporary Pakistan.
The Geometry of God is set in late 1970s Islamabad, when Zia embraced
Islamisation and enforced Nizam-e-Mustafa in Pakistan. This was also the
time when Pakistan supported Afghan mujahideen in their war against
the Soviets. The effects of the political decisions of that era are captured
in Trespassing, which is set in Karachi in the late 1980s and 1990s, an era
of Pakistani history when Karachi became the battleground for many
aggrieved sectarian and ethnic nationalities; Sindhis, locals, Urdu-
speaking muhajirs, Pathans and Afghan muhajirs all came into conflict
with each other for political and economic reasons. This situation wors-
ened due to the influx of Afghan mujahideen, who brought with them
the Kalashnikov culture. Thinner Than Skin, although set in Pakistan’s
Kaghan Valley, makes some explicit references to the post-9/11 situation
for Pakistanis abroad, as I will go on to discuss. Spanning more than 30
years, Khan’s novels recapitulate the history of the subcontinent and
beyond, leading her readers from the buildup to 11 September 2001 to
its repercussions. She is not only interested in highlighting how ethnic
and cultural conflicts within the national space contribute to a greater
international fear of Muslims following 9/11, but also in ways in which
the current stereotyping of Muslims in the US and Britain has become
mass mediated.
Bearing this context in mind, Khan’s novels retrospectively serve
as “prologues to post-9/11 fiction” by historically contextualising
contemporary Pakistan. While Khan partly blames the indigenous
political scenario of the 1980s and 1990s for negative perceptions
of Muslims in the world, she is equally critical of US global politi-
cal games that serve to target Muslim countries.7 If Zia’s regime was
responsible for reviving the concept of militant jihad in the subcon-
tinent, US imperialistic ventures, from the time of the Afghan War
(1979–89) to the present, have played an equal role in inculcating fear
of Muslims in mainstream US and British discourses. Khan’s polemical
stance on this issue is inflected by her own lived experience. In one of

her articles she argues:
Militant Islamic movements are a product of the US financing of the

Islamic Jihad. Osama is America’s creation. You want change? Be the
first US president to acknowledge this link. The United States has
a responsibility to Fess Up, and a responsibility to address its past
mistakes without killing more innocent civilians. It’s Pakistanis who’ve
had to watch Pakistan destroyed because of the US-funded Jihad. It’s
we who’ve been living in the debris of your Cold War. (“A Letter to
Barack Obama” n.p.)
In The Geometry of God and Trespassing – the quintessence of her

nuanced engagements with similar themes – Khan intricately shows
how the roots of post-9/11 “war on terror” propaganda extend at least
back to 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The role
the US played in funding the Afghan holy mujahideen’s resistance to
the Soviets is reasonably well known. The US used this land to combat
its Cold War rival the Soviet Union. However, after the breakup of the
Soviet empire, the US not only deserted the Afghan land, now inhabited
by the Afghan Taliban, but also waged a global war against the same
mujahideen by labelling them as terrorists.8 In The Geometry of God,
Khan shuttles between direct and indirect speech, as well as internal
and external narrativisation, in order to provide a range of locally valid
responses to the issues she intends to highlight in her novel. In the
novel, Faisal, a journalist who is working on the issue of suicide bomb-
ing, says: “the Americans shouldn’t have deserted the Afghans. ‘You
can’t just leave them with the weapons and the mess once they win for
you. Now look what’s happening there. Chaos with living ghosts. They
were nothing but a hit and run’” (232). In Trespassing, too, an official at
the water office grumbles:
Last year three million unlicensed guns were buying in country,

the Afghan War ending three years ago, but guns keep coming. The
Amreekans were arming and training us to fight the Communists but
now we are left to fight ourselves. … They just left, those Amreekans.
They didn’t care what they leaving behind. (333)
Khan, in both novels, contextualises the history of Pakistan and

Afghanistan in relation to the long history of absolute US power over
oil-rich Muslim countries. Gabriele Marranci articulates this point with
some clarity: “The US also had their plans for Afghanistan. What the
US government envisaged was not democracy and human rights for
the Afghan people, but securing, through agreements with the Taliban
regime its oil-related interests” (76). Daanish argues the same point
in Trespassing: “[t]he Cold War has ended, and we’re no longer useful
against the Soviets, so we’re the enemy” (270). This, as Mamdani argues,
gestures towards a US agenda: “to unite a billion Muslims worldwide in a
holy war, a crusade, against the Soviet Union, on the soil of Afghanistan.
The notion of a crusade, rather than jihad, conveys better the frame of
mind [9/11 propaganda] in which this initiative was taken” (128). This
unguarded reference to pursuing a “crusade” was meant to perpetuate
the split between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims” that I will return
to in next few pages. The recent shifts in US policy in Afghanistan and
Pakistan from pro-Taliban to anti-Taliban, as well as the monstrous dis-
tortion of Afghan jihad in the US media after 9/11, highlight America’s
own strategic and economic interests. Khan, for instance, suggests in
her polemical writing that in the on-going US drone attacks “more
Pakistanis have been killed than those who died on 9/11. No, there is
never any point in exchanging number with number, unless you are the
number that doesn’t count” (“Lawyers Take to the Streets” n.p.).
Indubitably, the Afghan War has globalised the concept of jihad as the
number of mujahideen that moved to Afghanistan from different parts of
the Muslim world to fight their enemies was not something typical but
in fact had never previously been seen. However, this internationalisa-
tion of jihad, according to John Esposito, is also a reaction against US for-
eign policy in the Muslim world. From the US slogans for a “war against
evil and merchants of death” to the media war against Afghanistan and
Iraq; from “the American government’s tough stand with Yasser Arafat
but kid-glove treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s aggres-
sive policies in the West Bank and Gaza” to foreign policies with regards
to “sanctions on more than a half-million Iraqi children, and sanctions
against Pakistan while failing to hold India and Israel to similar stand-
ards for their nuclear programs”, US foreign policy in the Muslim world
has provided reasons for the current transnational jihadist movements to
respond in radical ways (152–155). The US-led Afghan War, the Second
Gulf War, the 2006 War in Lebanon, 9/11 and the continued suffering of
Palestinians under Israeli occupation have all brought vast and disparate
Islamic communities closer and increasingly politicised them. Zahab and
Roy similarly conclude that “it is the degree of anti-Americanism which
allows the radicalism of a movement to be measured, rather than its
commitment to promotion of the Shari’a” (72).
As I stated at the beginning of the chapter, the Islamisation of Pakistan

during Zia’s regime – which resulted in Sunni–Shia sectarian rivalry –
was connected to wider phenomena in Afghanistan and the Middle
East. By expanding the lens of her analysis of the situation in Pakistan
to the late 1970s in Trespassing and The Geometry of God, Khan not only
highlights intra-Muslim sectarian violence, but also shows how it was
manipulated by the US during the Soviet–Afghan and Gulf Wars, which
certainly have had repercussions for today’s Pakistan. Khan is one of
the very few Pakistani writers of English fiction who have written about
the Gulf Wars; it is usually the Afghan War that is the focus (as in nov-
els by Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie and Faryal Gauhar) because of
Pakistan’s direct involvement in Afghan jihad. Khan situates contempo-
rary Pakistan in relation to far wider global power struggles. Indubitably,
US interference in internal Arab affairs and the heavy militarisation
of the Gulf region furthered the jihadist movement of al-Qaeda. Most
importantly, as a result of its involvement in both wars either directly
or indirectly, Pakistan has emerged as a leading locus of terrorism in the
world, as propagated in the mainstream US media. Khan analyses these
links between Pakistan, Afghan and the Gulf Wars in her novels, linking
the framing of Muslims to “war on terror” rhetoric.
Khan repeatedly argues in her journalistic writings that in order “to
understand what’s happening in Iraq today, we have to understand
American global interests, as they have been for too many hidden
decades” (“The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War” n.p). Khan refers
to these US global interests and the media-based propaganda dur-
ing the first Gulf War in her novels. In Trespassing, through Daanish,
Khan describes the experiences of living in a so-called free land. While
preparing a report on the Gulf War for a journal, precisely at the time
when the US is bombing Iraq for invading Kuwait, Daanish starts to
explore his suspicions about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and contemplates
the problems pertaining to misreporting during the war. Although
Daanish’s professors urge him to speak the objective truth, he is com-
pletely taken aback to find that in reality no-one is willing to accept
exactly that. He wonders how even though it has been six weeks since
Iraq invaded Kuwait, not even one class discussion has addressed the
attack, let alone the way it has been reported. What is being reported is
the partial truth. He contemplates:
No one mentioned the international sanctions against Iraq or the

freezing of its assets. Without oil exports, the nation was unable to
import food. Daanish had found nothing in the US media about the
effects of those sanctions nor about the peace settlements he knew,

through the international press, were ongoing. Americans had been
told little besides the fact that 40,000 US troops had been sent to
Saudi Arabia. They’d been told the deployment was defensive, even
though it was as large as the one in Vietnam. (146)
In Trespassing, Khan sometimes seems to be using characters’ mono-

logues to press her own arguments, as revealed directly in her non-
fictional writings. Daanish, for example, seeks in his long monologues
to uncover what led Iraq to invade Kuwait and why. He contemplates
how after eight years of war with Iran, Iraq’s efforts to rebuild its
economy were crushed by Kuwait’s violation of OPEC rules. Kuwait also
started to extract oil from the oil field on the disputed Iraq–Kuwait bor-
der. Daanish’s research on the subject provides him with an opportunity
to reflect upon intra-Muslim conflicts from a different perspective, and
he says: “[Kuwait] did this with US approval. After all, the US supplied
the technology” (147). There is no denying the fact that Kuwait, being
one of Iraq’s biggest creditors during the war, might have loaned Iraq its
own products and when it demanded the debt to be paid, have simul-
taneously increased its production, but these stories remain untold. In
the novel, Daanish also ruminates:
These are events not mentioned in the more popular newspapers and maga-
zines, but in light of Iraq’s invasion, I believe they ought to be. All angles
of the situation ought to be examined, all parties ought to be included in
the debate and the debate ought to be made available to the public. But
why is the public not being told what the UN, US, Iraq, Kuwait and other
relevant Middle Eastern nations are discussing? Does the US have other
plans? (147)
Daanish, in his report, flags up this long-term US plan to maintain abso-

lute power in the Gulf region for its own economic gain. The US funded
Iraq in its war against Iran because the Islamic revolution in Iran was
a threat to the US’s interference in the Middle East. “Once that threat
was over”, the US rallied the United Nations and twenty five countries
against Iraq and:
[p]ractically overnight, it was again declared a threat in a document with

a name worth noting, War Plan 1002–90. Why the about-face? It was
the same Iraq, the one that had been funded and armed by the US during
the War. Mirroring the government’s shift, the US media also began to
portray Iraq differently. It was no longer an ally. It had become the enemy.
(147–148)
Daanish has been told by his grandfather: “To fight political battles
without a newspaper is like going to war without weapons” (25), a stance
that quite clearly replicates Khan’s. From his own experience in the US,
Daanish realises that “He had only to dig into the reporting on the Gulf
War to know it was won with weapons that exploded not just on land
but on paper. Yet few fought back” (25).
While analysing the historical and social conditions that have shaped
Arabs’ behaviour towards non-Arab States in the Middle East, as por-
trayed in Trespassing, I find useful Hamdi Hassan’s argument that media
coverage during the Gulf crises reflects America’s “obsession with the
homo Arabicus, Saddam Hussain”. Most of the information about the
causes and motivation for war comprises “hastily compiled problem-
solving literature” (197, 198). Hassan’s argument with regard to the
construction of Saddam’s image as homo Arabicus or homo Islamicus
during the Gulf War has important implications – which Khan seeks
to explore in her novels and other journalistic writings – for dominant
structures of representation and the processes by which certain stereo-
types are constructed. In order to accomplish its mission, the US started
personalising Arab politics by presenting Saddam as the vanguard of
pan-Arab and pan-Islamic identity. The representation of the Gulf War
in the media created the impression that “only Saddam lived in Iraq and
it was, in essence, an uninhabited land” (Hassan 198). He was not only
presented as a threat to Kuwait but also to other Arab states, including
Saudi Arabia; something of which Mamdani has already warned us: the
unquestioning split between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims” by
President Bush to contextualise debates surrounding terrorism. Good
Muslims, “anxious to clear their names and conscience of this horrible
crime” would indubitably support so-called war on terror while bad
Muslims are “clearly responsible for terrorism” (15). Saddam, according
to this proposition, was presented as a bad Muslim. Morey and Yaqin’s
recent book on the issue of stereotyping Muslims after 9/11 provides
an interesting insight into the processes by which certain images (such
as Saddam’s) are constructed and, when used again and again, become
“default signifier[s]” and “fetish object[s]” (19–25). Referring to Homi
Bhabha’s “psychoanalytic coordinates of the stereotype”, Morey and
Yaqin argue that stereotypes of Muslims have continued to be con-
structed and recognised in such a way that the meaning of such images
can easily be “made, broken, and remade in different ways” (24). This is
what happened in Saddam Hussein’s case during the Gulf War. Saddam
Hussein who, until 1991, was allowed to commit his atrocities with
the full support of the US government, suddenly became “Islamic Rage
Boy”9 when he invaded Kuwait – an Anglo-American oil protectorate.
During the Second Gulf War, Christopher Hitchens – “a cheerleader
for George Bush’s interventionist policies in the Persian Gulf” (Morey
and Yaqin 27) – supported the Bush invasion of Iraq by establishing
links between the Saddam Hussein era and al-Qaeda. Saddam’s osten-
sible link with al-Qaeda was used as a justification for waging war
against thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.10 It was believed that
“Iraq ha[d] replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next, or
second-generation of “professionalized” jihadis’ (Gerges 264). Quoting
Hitchens, Morey and Yaqin also argue that an impression was created
that “the removal of the Saddam Hussein despotism has inflamed the
world’s Muslims against us and made Iraq hospitable to terrorism, for
all the world as if Baathism had not been pumping out jihadist rhetoric
for the past decade” (26–28). What Morey and Yaqin suggest is that
Hitchens, by conflating Baathist and jihadist rhetoric, homogenises the
whole Muslim community by excluding liberal opponents of the war,
thereby perpetuating the stereotypes of barbarism and hostility associ-
ated with Islamic Rage Boy; Islamic Rage Boy becomes a metonym for
the entire Muslim community.
The same process forms the backdrop of Khan’s Trespassing, which
portrays the experiences of a journalism student of Muslim Pakistani
origin in the US. Daanish’s encounter with his journalism profes-
sor is very significant in understanding the concept of Islamic Rage
Boy, as well as the homogenising tendencies within the West in the
branding of all Muslims as Arabs. In the episode, Daanish’s report
on the Gulf War has been dismissed as “a weak analysis” by his tutor
Wayne because Daanish, “being an [ostensible] Arab”, must be taking
“pride” in his own nation (148). Santesso’s concept of “disorientation”
remains relevant here. Marked down as a “Muslim” immigrant in the
West, irrespective of the diversity within Muslim cultures, Daanish
“feels ‘completely lost’, unsure as to how to resolve his or her faith
with secular integration, uncertain about his … place in a society that
seems to demand a rejection of his … values and indeed identity” (19).
Perceived as a holder of “ambiguous loyalties” [Muslim/Arab/Pakistani]
(Santesso 20), he cannot be expected to undertake objective research.
Wayne also makes it clear to Daanish that he is “going to get nowhere
by siding with Saddam” (149). Moreover, as Chambers suggests, in one
phrase Daanish’s tutor elides “the myriad differences between Arabs and
Pakistanis”, ultimately reducing his “journal to mere opinion (while

hysterical American headlines about Saddam Hussein are interpreted
as factual)” (“Comparative” 129). Chambers’s argument flags up an
important issue with reference to the concept of solidarity within the
Muslim ummah. During the First Gulf War, Pakistan was part of the
US-led international military coalition; nevertheless, “a vocal segment
of public opinion in Pakistan supported ousting of the Kuwaiti monarch
and approved of Saddam Husayn’s defiance of the United States-led
coalition” (Blood 249).
In Trespassing, Wayne’s impression of Daanish’s taking “pride in his
own” alludes to this assumption that the Pakistani nation is a part of a
global Muslim ummah (although this concept was indeed revived during
Zia’s involvement in the Afghan jihad, as I argue in the first part of my
chapter). According to Khan, “[t]he notion that there is such a thing as
the Muslim ummah or Brotherhood has gone from being a bad joke to a
nightmare that we somehow have to wake up from” (“Unbearably” n.p.).
In fact, this notion of solidarity within the Muslim ummah serves, above
all, to justify US long-term plans to target Pakistan in the name of “war
on terror” propaganda. No wonder, then, that Osama bin Laden has also
been made a default signifier, a fetish object in American and British
discourse that provided the US Army with reasons to kill thousands of
civilians in drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Khan rightly says:
Dead Iraqis are not the war. Dead Afghans are not the war.
International news channels conceal the war crimes committed by
the US and UK. Ancient civilizations are being torn to shreds, forever.
Their people will be deprived of a name, dignity, and voice for several
generations, if not for ever. The Western media reports none of this,
but it is so, so surprised that others don’t want free speech. (“Live
from Lahore” n.p.)
As we have seen, Khan condemns atrocities by the US and its related

economic gains in both her journalistic writings and her novels; to her,
President Bush’s strategy in the Gulf War was not only influenced by
“the biased pro-Israeli lobby” (Hassan 3) but also replicated the inter-
vention strategy called the “Carter Doctrine”, which states that “any
challenge to US access to the Middle East oil can be met with military
force” (“The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War”). In Trespassing,
Daanish’s chacha (uncle) says: “That war was a crime. … What did those
poor Iraqis ever do to them? I tell you, oil is a curse. Look at Iran. Look
at Libya” (159). These partial stories are part of the Gulf Crises. During
his discussion with Liam about American prejudices towards Muslims,

and in particular Arabs, Daanish says:
You want to hear about being wronged. Not about who you’re
wronging. A bombing raid kills hundreds in Panama or Iraq, it’s not
even on the news. But an American is harassed anywhere outside
the States and it’s the lead story on every network … That’s why you
care nothing about breaking international laws or the effects of the
sanctions. They hate you, remember? So it’s okay to kill them. (320)
Besides these global power games,11 Khan’s novels interestingly

engage with the problems that Third-World countries face as a result of
their dependency on First-World superpowers. Daanish’s comment, in
Trespassing, accentuates this problem:
While poor countries are punished for defending themselves, the

strongest military power in the world comes up with excuses to keep
building its weaponry. … The problem is that we require aid at all.
Beggars, that’s what we are. We can either join the bullies or stay the
beggars. Those are our two choices. (270)
Given a situation in which Pakistan cannot play the bully, Khan does
not hesitate to condemn riots and protests in the country which,
according to her, provides the US with opportunities to interfere in
indigenous politics:
the “protests” are simply a way of taking the bait. They give the US
and UK governments exactly the advantage they seek, helping divide
the world into “West” and “Islamic”, keeping the War on Terror
burning. If the Muslim world were better educated and better fed,
the cameras would expose the hypocrisies of the war-makers instead:
international courts would condemn them, and the rest of us could
live without the interference of self-appointed Powers and their two-
faced freedom. (“Live from Lahore” n.p.)
Khan’s condemnation of the riots and protests within the Muslim world,
and more specifically in Pakistan – such as the recent protests against
the derogatory YouTube video Innocence of Muslims and against Salmaan
Taseer for his criticism of the Blasphemy Law, or even the recent wave of
intolerance towards minority groups, especially Christians – accentuates
the problematic of Muslims’ image construction in the West.
It is in this context that it is necessary to attend to a home–diaspora

nexus in Khan’s novels. In The Geometry of God, a Pakistani evolutionist
Zahoor is condemned by his own son for his propagation of secular-
ist ideas in an Islamic state. Zahoor’s son lives in Paris and is resentful
towards his father for the supposedly heretical philosophy he is spread-
ing through his lectures. Zahoor’s son writes a letter of “such disdain
[to his father:] ‘How could you humiliate me? We need you to represent
us, to show the world the pure face of our motherland, not make us
look bad. How am I to live here with your dishonour? It has spoiled
my image’” (257). The anger that Zahoor’s son displays in fact evokes
anxieties about the negative perceptions of Muslims and their cultures
in the US and UK. These concerns are exacerbated in the aftermath of
9/11, as I will illustrate in my next example.
Khan’s latest novel, Thinner Than Skin (2012), is a story about a
Pakistani photographer, Nadir Sheikh. While searching for a job in the
US, Nadir meets a Pakistani girlfriend, Farhana, who travels home with
him to the northern Himalayan Mountains in Kaghan to see glaciers
“mating”. As the story begins, readers learn about Nadir’s passion for
landscape photography. However Nadir, as a Pakistani photographer,
is criticised by a US stock-photo agency for failing to capture authen-
tic pictures of his land and culture. He has been told that the agency
“might be interested in [him], but not in [his] landscapes” (Thinner
Than Skin 11). Nadir is asked by the agency to show Americans “the
dirt. The misery. Don’t waste your time trying to be a nature photog-
rapher. Use your advantage” (11). Given his previous experience with
the US stock agency, Nadir carefully composes his portfolio for his
second interview. He includes some memorable pictures of his fam-
ily history, such as his mother’s marble table top from the 1800s, as
an example of his cultural heritage. But to his great surprise, Nadir
is then told that his “photographs lack authenticity” because there
are no “beggars or anything that resembles [his] culture” (12). Nadir
responds with confidence: “The marble is a real part of my family
history. It’s old, from 1800,” but the interviewer waves his hand. “It
seems to me that when a war’s going on, a table is trivial. A Waidhofer
can be a nature photographer of the Wild West but a Sheikh must be a
war photographer of the Wild East! He must wow the world not with
the assurance of grace. He must wow the world with the assurance of
horror” (12–13). The conversation between Nadir and the interviewer
emphasises the general perception about Pakistan as a country that
has almost always been portrayed in a negative light by the Western
media since 9/11.
Likewise, in Trespassing, whilst on a flight to Pakistan in order to

attend his father’s funeral, Daanish’s experience reflects the same mis-
perceptions about Pakistanis. He listens to an announcement by a flight
attendant on the plane: “Only those ladies and gentlemen holding
American, Canadian, or European passports could disembark for the
duration of the stopover. Those naughty others might escape, so they
must stay on board” (26). He encounters similar perceptions about his
country in the US. In one episode in the novel, when he tells his girl-
friend Becky that his father is a doctor, “she eye[s] him quizzically, as
if unable to believe the Third World ha[s] doctors” (31). Realising that
she will not easily be convinced, he quotes exact figures: “In Pakistan,
on average a physician earns about ten dollars an hour. While this is
extremely high as compared to the national average, it’s not enough
to send a child to America on, is it?” Whenever they discuss this issue,
Daanish needs to tell her with “far more exasperation than the first
time, ‘Not everyone who’s brown or black is either dirt poor or filthy
rich. There are in-betweens’” (31).
In light of the examples just discussed, we see that Khan attempts
to relate the historical development of hostile attitudes towards Islam
to South Asians and to their socio-political contexts rather than fixing
her gaze on merely 9/11 as the marker for changed perception about
Muslims and Islam. Khan does not decontextualise 9/11. She suggests
that it “came out of recent history, that of the late Cold War” (Mamdani
11). In doing so, one significant contribution by Khan in deconstruct-
ing the negative stereotypes of Muslims and Islam is the way she takes
a more gendered approach towards “war on terror” propaganda, which
is the focus of my next section.
Gendering the war on terrorism
Demonstrating a more gendered focus on the “war on terrorism” and its

aftermath than many of her contemporaries, Khan’s novels deconstruct
a gender-based binary that some South Asian fiction writers accentu-
ate through images of burqa-clad women. Khan is specifically critical
of those writings of Muslim or South Asian origin that portray women
living in a Muslim culture as “passive, pathetic creatures”, while those
living in the West are depicted as “liberated”.12 This kind of depiction,
according to Khan, tends to reproduce the axioms of Orientalism. In
contrast to this imperialist narrativisation of Muslim/Asian women,
Khan, in both The Geometry of God and Trespassing, portrays strong-
minded, sensuous women in the cities, mountains and fields, working
and struggling to find their place in male-dominated cultures. In doing

so, she can be seen to challenge the traditional gender roles assigned to
women, particularly within the subcontinental context. She contends
that “[l]ocal religious zealots control her in the name of Islam; the
West controls her in the name of freedom. She is never consulted: why
should she be, when she has no intellect, no artistry? She does not
belong to herself but to others, white, brown, and black” (“Pakistan:
Women and Fiction Today” n.p.).
A wide range of female characters in Khan’s novels reflect heterogene-
ous dissenting voices complicating what Morey and Yaqin call the “save
the Muslim woman” trope propagated by “political channels of empow-
erment” in the West. Morey and Yaqin argue that the trope of freeing
the Muslim woman from “Islamic male tyranny” has “tremendous
emotional appeal and longevity”; it was used, for example, to justify
military interventions in the Gulf in 1991, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq
in 2003 (4, 10). According to Khan, post-9/11 fictional narratives spe-
cifically highlight the stories from the Muslim world that feature forced
marriages, beatings, rape and women behind burqas (“Pakistan: Women
and Fiction Today” n.p.). Khan seeks to disrupt essentialist ideas that
often represent Third World women as a homogenous group, eliding
specific cultural, social and economic contexts. Her female characters
both rebel against patriarchal traditions and reveal that women’s lives
are not exclusively defined by their gender.
In Trespassing, despite being a successful entrepreneur and a feminist,
Dia’s Western-educated mother Riffat, is made to realise by her lover
Shafqat that the liberty and freedom that she has enjoyed in London
cannot be enjoyed in Pakistan, because she “can’t transport something
that exists here to another place” (422). Although through Riffat’s
character Khan flags up gender disparities in patriarchal societies like
Pakistan, at the same time she refuses to overlook the possibility of
female self-empowerment within the same patriarchal setup. Being
a strong woman of the upper class, Riffat is vocal and expresses her
resentments to her lover: “when women appear in public as frequently
and comfortably as men, that’s an import? An evil outside influ-
ence? … You want efficiency, hygiene, and a free press – but not that
modernity should benefit women” (423). Riffat’s impassioned rebellion
against patriarchal authority can also be seen in her determination
to run her family business. The way she continues to run her family
business herself, despite family pressures after her husband’s murder to
hand it over to someone else, is the symbolic reinforcement of female
subjectivity.
Similarly, Riffat’s daughter Dia, again an urban upper-class woman, is

simultaneously independent and restricted in Pakistani patriarchal soci-
ety. Being a daughter of an educated and liberal mother, Dia enjoys the
freedom to move in her society without restrictions. She is perhaps one
of those few daughters in her country who has been told by her mother
“to marry only out of love, not obligation” (13). Following her mother’s
footsteps, Dia is shown to be passionate about her relationship with
Daanish, regardless of the fact that her society largely disapproves of
this forbidden affair. However, she is equally self-conscious because she
is living in a society “[w]here a woman’s reputation was the currency
that measured her worth” (289). Even Riffat warns her that “You’ve no
idea how hostile society gets if you challenge it” (289). Yet, despite being
community-conscious, Dia listens to her own will. Like her mother, she
is an independent spirit and refuses to accept the subservient role that
Pakistan’s male-dominated society imposes on her. She continues her
secret love with Daanish regardless of her mother’s warning.
It is important to note that the choices made by Riffat and Dia are
only available to women of a certain class and status. For example, as a
working-class woman, Sumbul’s economic independence is not a sym-
bol of her liberation and autonomy: she works in Riffat’s silk factory
out of obligation. However, in some ways Sumbul’s job in the silk farms
provides her a momentary relief from life at home, which:
meant a mother-in-law working her from dawn till midnight, a

belligerent husband who sometimes beat her, three other children,
countless neighbors pouring in for gossip and meals bought with her
money, an open sewer outside the kitchen, and absolutely nowhere
for her to sit quietly for two minutes and sip her very own cup of
tea. If she tried, the other women would snap, “We never had such
luxuries at your age.” (427)
In a limited way, Sumbul gains a few hours of freedom from domestic

responsibilities by working in the silk farms.
Although framed against Zia’s rigid Islamisation of Pakistani society,
The Geometry of God provides a glimpse of modern energetic women
who all react differently to society’s oppressive double standards. Due
to the educated background of their family, Amal and Mehwish experi-
ence a far more liberated existence than other women of the society.
Amal offers insights into a modern Pakistan where women may pioneer
their ways into professions traditionally reserved for men. Even after
her marriage, Amal insists on going “on digs” even though it involves
being alone “with many men” (304). She becomes her country’s first
woman palaeontologist. She is equally assertive in her personal life
as she chooses to marry a man she loves. Despite her mother-in-law’s
occasional grumblings that she is not a dutiful daughter-in-law, she
lives her life on her own terms, saying: “I’m a creature of this world
and can’t renounce it. I need to scratch fingerprints, and leave my own”
(301). Whereas her mother’s generation seems to bear the burden of
patriarchal restrictions, Amal is shown to engage in a physical relation-
ship with Omar without severe repercussions. She often goes secretly
with Omar to his friend’s house – their “own private court” – to satisfy
their “sexual appetite”. Amal believes that “the only way to taste divine
sensuality is through love of a mortal” (252).
Amal’s dependency upon English rather than Urdu in describing
her love-making seems to challenge the taboos that her Islamised
society has imposed on her. As she says: “My religious vocabulary’s
Urdu-Arabic, social vocabulary Urdu-English, but sexual vocabulary
only English” (274). Moreover, as Kabir argues, Amal’s dependence on
English also foregrounds her “ability to break out of the elaborate cali-
brations of class and position that hold [Omar] back from embracing
the full gamut of ways to be ‘Pakistani’” (182). However, while Amal
resorts to English to challenge these taboos, Omar ridicules her use of
English which, according to him, “helps [her] hide [her] jinsi bhook”
(sexual appetite) (274). For Amal, “[her] mother’s tongue [Urdu] is as
chaste as [her] mother”. By contrast, Omar can easily shed his Punjabi
pride and uses “ladylike Urdu” which, according to him, isn’t “as
proper as you Urdu wallahs think. You leave out all the good words,
forgetting the language comes from those who loved to love” (274).
In their own ways, both represent modern Pakistan. Amal does so by
rebelling against orthodox societal norms and the oppressive dictates of
Islamisation within Pakistan that specifically target Pakistani women.
This is further foregrounded through Amal and Omar’s relationship
after their marriage. When Amal’s mother-in-law complains about her
going on digs alone, Omar neither defends Amal nor stops her from
going on digs.
Like Amal, her younger sister Mehwish is also made to represent
the modern Pakistani generation through her – albeit innocent and
unconscious – dismissal of “radicalism as badly regurgitated politi-
cized theology” (Zinck 43–53): this is illustrated in the novel through
Mehwish’s subversive use of language. Mehwish, who was blinded in
childhood, manipulates her weakness and enjoys what others cannot.
She deciphers the world she cannot see but understands it better than
many others. In fact, based on what she hears, Mehwish’s mis(spellings)

become revelatory in many respects. As Khan says in an interview: “It’s
Mehwish’s ability to adapt that allows her to become, in many ways, the
soul of the book – without her zest for word play, puns, drawings, and
mischief, the book would lose much of its zauq” (Aftab n.p.). Mehwish,
in her ignorance, says many things about sex, love, religion and rela-
tionships that would otherwise remain unsayable in Pakistan’s patriar-
chal and Islamised society. For example, promiscuous becomes “promise
kiss” (182), intimacy becomes “inty messy”, melancholy becomes “me
link holy,” etiquette becomes “eticut” and experiment becomes “ex
pearmint” (48). Zinck provides an interesting explanation of Mehwish’s
“phonic splits” which, according to him, reflect “a certain disregard for
authority and orthodoxy”. For example, words like “Dog ma”, “sin a
men”, “a her tick” and “dead literalists” provide a compelling reference
to “the zealots of apocalyptic superstition and literal reading of the
Quran epitomized by Jamat-e-Pedaish”. In doing so, Mehwish becomes
the “echo chamber” of her subversive elder sister, Amal” (Zinck 49).
It is also interesting to note that Khan’s purpose is not just to pre-
sent a critique of gender inequality within patriarchal societies. She
adds new dimensions to her writings by linking female stereotyping
to a global “war on terror”. What made Khan focus particularly on her
female characters were stories about “women of cover” (Abu-Lughod
783), which have become reductive tropes used to justify a situation
that has cynically been described by Spivak as “white men[’s obsession
with saving] brown women from brown men” (“Can the Subaltern
Speak” 271–313). As Khan argues:
First, consider what is written about “us.” Since 9/11, a cornucopia of

“true stories” from the Islamic world have been consumed, all pack-
aged in identical covers: women behind burqas. The stories univer-
sally feature forced marriages, beatings, rape. Clearly, we’re supposed
to be wretched. Oppression is turned into spectacle, as in Married by
Force by Leila or My Forbidden Face by Latifa. This type of narrative is
double-edged: suffering is sold to help justify war; war is peddled as
the cure to suffering, not the cause. (“Pakistan: Women and Fiction
Today” n.p.)
According to Khan, such depictions13 became significant tropes for

emphasising prominent and influential political and cultural dis-
courses, such as justifying the 2001–02 war with Afghanistan that began
after terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. Such
representations also propose a paternalistic stance towards Muslim

women. Miriam Cooke argues that Islamophobia has been intensified
by statements such as that given by First Lady Laura Bush in her radio
address to the nation on 17 November 2001, in which she expressed her
fear that: “Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in
horror not only because our hearts break for the women and children
in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the
terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us” (470). Abu-Lughod
suggests that this kind of cultural framing, by highlighting treatment
of Muslim women in their cultures, tends to segregate the world into
separate spheres, ultimately “recreating an imaginative geography of
West versus East, Us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give
speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas”
(783–790). Referring to US President Obama’s speech on 27 March 2009,
Khan writes bitterly that:
For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn

their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a para-
lyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan
people – especially women and girls. The President failed to mention
the conditions under which “especially women and girls” have lived
since the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Human rights and
women’s organizations, including the Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan, have warned that conditions for Afghan
women have worsened, not improved. (“Pakistan: Women and
Fiction Today” n.p.)
The purpose of highlighting these facts is neither to deny the reality of

women’s oppression in Afghanistan nor to defend the Taliban’s religious
fundamentalism, but to suggest ways in which by foregrounding har-
rowing images of burqa-clad women in Afghanistan, the US sanctioned
its own illegal entry into Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gulf region and
other Muslim countries. As Marranci argues: “During the Afghan anti-
Taliban war, the Western mass media emphasized that this war, which
cost at least 4,000 civilian lives, could bring democracy to the Afghan
people and in particular its burqa-covered women” (81).
Khan’s novels and her polemical writings actively negotiate social,
political and historical events within the subcontinent and Middle East
that underlie post-9/11 stereotyping of Muslims. In so doing, these nar-
ratives look beyond Huntington’s famous “clash of civilisations” model
that has had a tremendous appeal in shaping Islamophobic sentiments
since 9/11. Importantly, given the nature of complex and perplexing

ethnic and sectarian violence within Pakistan, Khan predominantly
uses pre-9/11 settings in her fiction in order to deconstruct emerging
indigenous binaries based on culture, ethnicity and religious affiliation,
as well to historically situate contemporary Pakistan in a global context.
Similarly, Khan’s gendered focus not only aims at critiquing Pakistan’s
patriarchal society, but also deconstructs the reductive trope of burqa-
clad Muslim women that has been used by the US to justify “war on
terror” propaganda. In light of the reasons discussed, it is interesting to
note that Khan offers a different opinion about the notion of a Muslim
ummah. She contends that in these times of “heightened paranoia and
mutual distrust”, hysterical protests by Muslims (whether it be over the
“Rushdie Affair”, a YouTube video or the Blasphemy Law) can only serve
to articulate new orthodoxy and neo-conservative narratives about the
Muslim ummah. Such narratives indubitably have their wide-ranging
ontological and epistemological effects, which I will discuss in my next
chapter with reference to Shamsie’s depiction of post-9/11 narratives of
Islamophobia and the misrepresentation of Muslims across the globe.
3
Re-imagining Home Spaces:
Pre- and Post-9/11 Constructions
of Home and Pakistani Muslim
Identity
Fictional representations of home and identity by second-generation

writers of Pakistani origin have received increasing attention, especially
in the post-9/11 scenario, with its attendant reductive representations
of Islamic fundamentalism. With an aim to rebut “9/11 fictional narra-
tives” that reinforce public rhetoric in the West and thereby equating
Islam with terrorism, Shamsie’s novels confront these negative interna-
tional attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. By locating her characters
in their ancestral homeland as well as abroad, Shamsie engages with
issues related to identity and migration that began to change as a result
of post-9/11 mainstream public narratives about suicide bombing, reli-
gious fanaticism, terrorism, jihad and Islamic fundamentalism. Linking
these two foci (transnational movement and Muslim identity in the
9/11 context), I will be concerned here to highlight the wide range
of experiences and dilemmas associated with Shamsie’s Pakistani and
migrant characters’ sense of identity, their struggles with hyphenated
identities, and the sometimes xenophobic imaginary of the white popu-
lation abroad. I specifically address the ways in which stigmatisation on
the basis of ethnicity has morphed into stigmatisation on the basis of
faith, illustrating how xenophobia has taken the form of Islamophobia.
As regards the post-9/11 phenomenon of Islamophobia, Shamsie,
like Khan, argues that the rise of religious extremism during Zia’s era in
conjunction with his support of Afghan mujahideen has partly contrib-
uted to hostile attitudes towards Islam and Muslims in the West because
of the revival of a concept of militant jihad. In their fiction, Khan,
Shamsie and Aslam all contextualise the post-9/11 framing of Muslims
and Islamophobia narratives in relation to Islamic reforms during Zia’s
regime, and to US interventions in the region since the late 1970s,
thereby foregrounding political and historical causes that underlie
112
Re-imagining Home Spaces 113
recent global stereotyping against Muslims and “war on terror” rhetoric.

This chapter, with its focus on Shamsie’s novels, foregrounds this inter-
face between national, regional, transnational and global politics as well
as between individual and collective identities in order to show how her
fictional Muslim characters negotiate their identities in the post-9/11
world. In so doing, her novels engage with a changing relationship
between home and identity and “war on terror” by linking post-9/11
constructions of home and identity to increasing ethnocentrism in
Pakistan since the 1947 and 1971 Partitions.
This historical contextualisation is crucial in understanding a transi-
tion that Shamsie’s novels chart from national to transnational identi-
ties. In Shamsie’s work, the second-generation characters, both at home
and in diaspora, tend to frame their identities in a far more flexible way
than the first generation. In the national context, Shamsie foregrounds
this by scrutinising the effects of the 1947 and 1971 Partitions on the
individual and collective lives of first- and second-generation Pakistanis;
she does this firstly by juxtaposing the civil violence of the 1971
Partition with the ethnic violence of the 1980s, and secondly by blur-
ring the boundaries between private and public, and between individual
and national histories. The second generation in Salt and Saffron (2000)
and Kartography (2002) is shown to deconstruct the sorts of reductive
ethno-nationalism (that have divided people of the same community
into various ethnic nationalities) which emerged in Pakistan in the after-
math of the 1947 and 1971 Partitions. In diasporic contexts, as seen in
Salt and Saffron and Burnt Shadows (2009), the second generation decon-
structs an East–West (margin–centre) binary and challenges the pur-
ported “clash of civilisations” by abstracting global space, achieved by
downplaying the importance of Western space in the novels. Shamsie’s
novels foreground a broader spectrum of second-generation identifica-
tions with home – through self-familiarising practices such as nostalgia,
memory, renaming places and other forms of cognitive (re)mapping –
which connect people of the same nation irrespective of their physi-
cal proximity or distance. This, in turn, makes the second generation
deconstruct reductive ethno-nationalist and racist identities in Pakistan
and in diaspora respectively.
Migration and homecoming: re-mapping identities

in cyber-culture
Using ethnocentrism as a key conceptual category for emphasising spa-

tial configurations of home, this section combines home and diaspora
contexts to deconstruct reductive ethno-nationalist and racist identities

in Pakistan and in diaspora respectively. In so doing, I understand trans-
national movement and nostalgia to be formative experiences among
second-generation Pakistanis in the construction of home as a spatial
rather than a geographical phenomenon. Transnational experiences of
Shamsie’s second-generation characters inculcate a strong nostalgia and
a sense of affiliation to homeland through “mental or cognitive map-
pings of urban reality” that Edward W. Soja calls the “urban imaginary”
(324). This nostalgia and affiliation to homeland in turn guarantee that
characters return to their homeland, and serve to critique reductive
ethno-nationalisms constructed by the first generation. My discussion
in this section focuses on Kartography and in particular on the ways in
which Karim, while away from Karachi, keeps himself connected with
his home through his obsession with map making. The discussion will
move from his critique of ethnocentrism through his map-making
activity, and towards his insistence on a collective identity that he prof-
fers through a (deterritorialised) interactive map of a mega-city, Karachi.
I suggest that in Shamsie’s oeuvre home – whether it be a geographi-
cally defined place or a spatial phenomenon – is a consolation not only
for those who dream of return, but also for those prepared to embrace
hyphenated identities in a new land.
Shamsie’s novels are peopled predominantly by Karachiites who expe-
rience strong nostalgic feelings for their homeland, in particular the
cityspace of Karachi that remains a significant place in Shamsie’s novels
while situating Pakistan in a global context. Karachi, for them, repre-
sents the fulfilment of desires, love and relationships. The ‘cityspace’ of
Karachi is represented in Shamsie’s novels as a “historical-social-spatial
phenomenon” which Soja calls the “spatial specificity of urbanism”
(8). Rather than discussing cities as physical structures, Soja is inter-
ested in the “mappable patternings of land use, economic wealth,
cultural identity, class differences, and the whole range of individual
and collective attributes, relations, thoughts, and practices of urban
inhabitants” (8). When figured like this, I argue that Karachi is prob-
ably the only city in Pakistan that exemplifies what Soja describes as
urban spatial specificity. Karachi is simultaneously vibrant and violent.
The “historically specific geography” (Soja 8) of Karachi’s cityspace is
shaped by economic dynamism and power hierarchies, by contending
social relations and increasing ethnocentrism, yet the city evokes a
strong nostalgia for Shamsie and for her characters. This is something
distinctive about Shamsie’s representation of Karachi. Her critique of
ethnocentrism within the cityspace of Karachi serves to deconstruct the
first generation’s ethno-nationalist identities. It is in this context that

In the City by the Sea (1998), Salt and Saffron (2000), Kartography (2002)
and Broken Verses (2005) present Shamsie’s idée fixe of her home city,
Karachi.
Shamsie comments: “I need a familiar space to write in, but I have
a home in all three places now” (Mostafa 149). However, having lived
in Karachi, London and New York, Shamsie continuously feels a strong
sense of homecoming. In this sense, her Karachi is neither an “imagi-
nary homeland” nor an “imagined community” based on what Susheila
Nasta describes as fragmented memory (Home Truths 9). Rather, Karachi,
specifically, a real place of recent memory, provides a dramatic back-
drop for Shamsie’s ethos of homeland, as she says: “because I [Shamsie]
am writing about actual Pakistanis, rather than stereotypes, the knock
on effect is to confront those stereotypes. People come up and tell me
that my novels give them a very different idea of the place” (Brown,
“A Writers Life” n.p.). Crucially, Shamsie’s characters do not share the
sense of loss that is characteristic of works of other exilic writers, because
the final destination of her characters tends to be their homeland. By
contrast, accentuating the dilemma of expatriates, including himself,
Rushdie feels that when we:
look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise

to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India
almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming
precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions,
not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands,
Indias of the mind. (Imaginary Homelands 10)
Shamsie’s characters generally do not suffer from amnesia, nor do they

emphasise the tendentious workings of memory. Her narrators retain
their memories of homeland despite the challenges of the experience of
migration. In Salt and Saffron, for example, Aliya, a 21-year-old member
of the Pakistani elite and a supreme storyteller, narrates the stories of her
extended aristocratic nawab family – Dard-e-Dil, its secrets and legends –
without inhibition, despite being away from home and living in the US.
As a diasporic South Asian woman writer, Shamsie is distinctive in
making dislocation an experience that does not threaten her second-
generation characters’ sense of identity; it is the first generation which
experiences identity crises. Rather, dislocation inculcates a strong sense
of affiliation with the homeland in her second-generation characters.
Through her characters’ transnational movements, Shamsie emphasises
home, ties, love and bonds. Kartography, a love story of two ‘soul mates’ –
Raheen and Karim – is set in Karachi at a time of political upheaval
and ethnic violence (the 1980s and 1990s). By juxtaposing the ethnic
riots of 1980s Karachi with the 1971 civil war, which resulted in the
creation of an independent Bangladesh, Shamsie foregrounds the 1971
Partition as a cruel historical event that has left irrevocable marks on the
infrastructure of the country, focusing specifically on the social fabric
of Karachi. She blends these aspects of national history with the family
histories of Raheen and Karim. Their parents swap fiancés as violence
breaks out against Bengalis during the 1971 civil war. Raheen’s father
Zafar, a muhajir, is engaged to Karim’s mother Maheen, a Bengali. But
this relationship does not survive the civil war because of hardening
attitudes towards those who come from the other side of the newly
partitioned nation, Bangladesh. Zafar, who is referred to as “a Bingo
lover” by his friends, succumbs to the ethnocentric prejudice against
Bengalis when he is criticised by his neighbour Shafiq (191). Shafiq’s
brother, Bilal, is killed by the Bangladeshi Resistance (Mukti Bahini)
which fought against the Pakistan Army in the Bangladesh Liberation
War of 1971. Shafiq abuses Zafar for planning “to marry one of them
[Bengalis]” (231). Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray’s concept of “the
disruptive and transformative energies of migrancy” (9–10) is relevant
here. In the context of 1971 migration, the novel’s first-generation
characters – who, although marginalised in the new homeland – are
shown to have survived by negotiating their hybrid differences in
Pakistan. However, with the eruption of civil war they began to experi-
ence “a more ambiguous, troubled and troubling state, a state of dislo-
cation”, both physical and mental (Bery and Murray 13). The following
conversation between Zafar and Shafiq illustrates Zafar’s internalisation
of such (ethnic) attitudes; he decides, “How can I marry one of them?
How can I let one of them bear my children? Think of it as a civic
duty. I’ll be diluting her Bengali blood line” (232). This past apparently
impacts upon Raheen’s world; Karim’s family moves to London because
of the ethnic violence in Karachi in the 1980s, which distances Raheen
from Karim. The love between these childhood friends is thus tested by
physical as well as emotional distance.
Raheen, in her twenties, returns from the United States to her home
city Karachi for annual vacations. While away from it, Karachi serves an
important purpose for Raheen. In Shamsie’s words:
I did want to have it be a way for her to have a strong sense of

Karachi as this place that she misses and loves, particularly because
she is away when all the violence is going on. I think it strengthens
her sense of being tied to the place. As she is in this university world,
where everything is sort of bucolic and idyllic around her, she’s away
from this other world in which things are completely falling apart.
She knows that this second world really is her world. Being away at
university serves that function, to make her feel more strongly that
she needs to go back. (Cilano, “In a World of Consequences” 155)
During Raheen’s stay in the US, the alluring metropolis of Karachi never
loses its gloss. Karim’s dislocation from Karachi as his family moves to
London in order to avoid violence in the city is similarly painful for
him. Before leaving, he expresses his feelings to Raheen: “‘I’ve already
started thinking of Karachi as a place that I have to say goodbye to;
every day I say goodbye to some part of it and then two days later I see
that part again and I feel so relieved but also not, because then I have to
say goodbye to it again’” (75). For Karim, departure from the homeland
is conceived of as a matter of life and death, as he says: “This must be
what dying is like” (75). However, Karim successfully fathoms how to
overcome this sense of dislocation from Karachi through his obsession
with map making.
Shamsie’s idea of whimsical techniques of navigation among
Karachiites – who “give directions in terms of landmarks and stories” –
foregrounds a certain kind of “familiarity [and] belonging, wrapped up
in every set of direction[s]”. For example, “go to the submarine rounda-
bout; turn into the lane where the car thief accosted Zia; drive until you
come to Sonia’s father’s office” (330–331). Maps prove to be a vinculum
between Karim and his home, keeping his life intact till he returns.
J. Edward Mallot notes:
The first [map] serves as Karim’s farewell present in 1987; this

pictures the route that leads away from his house and toward the
airport, making the map itself both a gift and a representation of
goodbyes – a replacement, perhaps, for the “goodbye” Karim fails to
say aloud. (261–284)
I would rather argue that Karim’s first map repudiates the very idea of
bidding farewell to his home as well as his soul mate: Karim is aware
that he “won’t know how to say goodbye” (112). His failure to say
goodbye aloud is figured as a proof of his strong affiliation with his
home and people, as well as with Raheen. His return is presented as
predestined. Moreover, his act of naming different roads and places of
Karachi is also indubitably linked to his feelings for the place and for
Raheen. While mentioning the Sind Club on his map, he writes: “at the
squash court I told you … I’d be leaving Karachi by August. You asked
me to get you a cold drink. When I returned your eyes were red. Did you
think I wouldn’t notice? Mine were red, too. I think you didn’t notice”
(112). His maps also keep Raheen and Karim connected, though Raheen
is unable, for a long time, to understand “what need [there] was … for
him to call the road by its official name …He has maps and I don’t
understand why” (65–66). At this stage Raheen does not comprehend
that maps are social constructions, although she does experience a kind
of restlessness while looking at them: While glancing at Karim’s map in
America, Raheen feels no comfort and relief from a feeling of homesick-
ness. What she could find in those maps are “[s]treets leading to other
streets, streets named, areas defined, places of interest clearly marked
out. This map was Karachi’s opposite” (131).
Raheen’s sense of dissatisfaction with maps is contrasted to Karim’s
interest in them. Whereas maps keep Karim connected to the homeland,
Raheen feels distanced by “maps and street names, which he knew I had
no interest in, and which seemed to serve only as a reminder of the dis-
tance between us” (135). However, Raheen’s homesickness is not just a
state of mind. She is also enmeshed in the identity crises defined by the
territorial world that separated her and Karim’s parents in the past. This is
where Shamsie uses Karim’s displacement and nostalgia in the diaspora to
critique ethnocentrism within the national context, specifically Karachi.
At the same time, Karim’s displacement and his emotional bond with
Raheen and with his home are contrasted to earlier displacements that
impacted on the relationships of his parents’ generation. The first genera-
tion’s reductive ethno-nationalism is contrasted to the second generation’s
concept of deterritorialised (collective) identities, as I will explain.
Given that Raheen’s and Karim’s family histories are shaped by the
civil violence of 1971 that separated Zafar and Maheen, Raheen fears
that continuing ethnic violence in Karachi is likely also to separate her
and Karim: she ponders “what I would feel if I ever lost Karim” (44).
Tensions between Karim’s and Raheen’s families because of their eth-
nic differences disturb Karim, as he sometimes speaks painfully about
himself as “half-Bengali” (42); thus Raheen feels distanced from Karim.
Aunty Runty’s comment epitomises the latent discrimination that
threatens to separate the families once again: “With Karim, you can’t
tell at all. That he’s half-Bengali. Never guess it. But let’s see – if one day
you decide your friend Karim is husband material, what will Daddy say
to that?”(74).
Accentuating the intersecting impacts of Partitions and ongoing

ethnic violence on the post-1971 generation in Kartography, Caroline
Herbert argues that the novel demonstrates the “intimate relationship
between individual and national histories that Raheen and Karim must
negotiate decades later. As the violence of contemporary Karachi closes
in, and as Maheen and Ali’s marriage disintegrates, Raheen and Karim
must confront the meanings of 1971 for their own relationship in
the 1990s” (161). In the light of Herbert’s argument, Karim’s agitation
regarding Aunty Leila’s bitter comments about the potential for ethnic
conflicts seems justified. While talking to her husband and Uncle Ali
about immigrants in Karachi, Aunty Leila says sarcastically:
Karachi’s my home, you know. Why did those bloody Muhajirs have
to go and form a political group? … Thinking just because they’re a
majority in Karachi they can trample over everyone else. Like they
did in 47 … ‘Do you hear the way people like Zafar and Yasmin talk
about “their Karachi”? My family lived there for generations. Who
the hell are these Muhajirs to pretend it’s their city! (40–41)
Here, Shamsie critiques the “nationalist constructions of Pakistaniness”

and “Muslimness” in the wake of the 1947 and 1971 migrations.
Shamsie thus problematises “the very notion of being ‘at home’ in
Pakistan” (Herbert 159–172). Cara Cilano’s comments remain relevant
here: “these historical narratives shape definitions of a Pakistani nation-
alist identity, from pre-1947 partition to post-1971 Pakistan, even as
they complicate the possibility of an inclusive notion of ‘Pakistaniness’”
(National Identities 28). Anatol Lieven flags up the same problem: the
“break-off of East Pakistan in 1971 seemed to destroy the premise of
Muslim nationalism on which Pakistan had been founded, in which
most Mohajirs had passionately believed, and for the sake of which they
had sacrificed so much” (313). Both Cilano’s and Herbert’s comments
are extremely pertinent in relation to the succession of Bangladesh. As
Bengalis experienced a double displacement within their own region –
first in 1947 and later in 1971 – they had to (re)negotiate their identities
twice, firstly as Pakistani citizens and secondly as Bangladeshi citizens.
Referring to Lieven’s observation, I argue that Shamsie problematises
the notion of being at home for both Bengali and muhajir communities
in Pakistan.
Most importantly, Shamsie suggests that national histories influence
human relations, and this is reflected through the social and political
lives of Karachiites in her novels. The social and political climate of
Karachi that had already been aggravated by Sindhi–muhajir conflicts

in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition deteriorated further in the after-
math of the 1971 civil war. By the 1990s, as a result of clashes between
muhajirs, Sindhis, Punjabis, Pathans and Afghans, Karachi had become
a battleground for conflicting ethnicities. In fact, the image of contem-
porary Pakistan as a land of terror owes a great deal to these ethnic and
sectarian conflicts and to the multi-faceted violence that has regularly
roiled Karachi and North Pakistan. Given such long-term repercussions
of the internal upheaval for contemporary Pakistan, Shamsie’s novels
can be read as a plea for a deterritorialised notion of home and belong-
ing. It is in this context that Karim’s interactive mapping serves to make
Karachi a “potentially productive site for a process of reconciliation”
by opening “a space for difference and non-identification”; Kartography
accordingly gestures “towards reconciliation between Pakistanis of
different generations and different social and ethnic backgrounds”
(Herbert 171). Karim’s maps become his tool for reformulating the
concept of ethnic identities within Pakistan.
Appadurai’s claim that “it is the imagination that will have to carry
us beyond the nation” emphasises the need to deterritorialise world
borders so as to reconnect members of the same community (qtd in Low
and Zuniga 337). This, however, generates various forms of reterritori-
alisations as Appadurai notes: “[t]hese reterritorialization efforts involve
direct attempts to extend national maps outward to follow diasporic
communities” (qtd in Low and Zuniga 345). In the novel, Karim grasps
this: unlike his and Raheen’s parents’ migrations, his dislocation does
not alienate him from Raheen because his maps provide the vectors of
a new geography, redefining the spatial and social boundaries that were
constructed by his parents’ generation. Appadurai’s statement remains
relevant for Pakistanis in both diasporic and national contexts. Karim’s
palimpsestic memory maps are an amalgam of conventionally iden-
tifiable places, stories, memories and personally inflected spaces that
continuously inform him about his home, as well as about the world
of social relations. As Gunnar Olsson observes: “any map is a weaving
together of picture and story, a palimpsest of many layers that on the
surface shows me where I am and deeper down tells me both whence
I came and where I should go” (101–109). Karim’s maps also help him
to “[look] out at imaginable futures” (20).
As Mostafa argues, “Karim’s interest in maps has a point: they link
people to their roots and save them from forgetting their history”
(163). Katie Davis also suggests: “Maps are already fetishes of a type …
They draw up associations of home and abroad, the known and the
unknown, belonging and longing” (137). Karim’s obsession with the

maps of his alienated city finally brings him back to reunite with his
soul mate: “There was no falling. He was born in love with her, and
he was borne by love all the way back to her, even though there was a
period of total stupidity in between” (338). There is an interesting echo
of Roy’s “born-again Muslim” phenomenon in the born/borne pun
of these lines. As opposed to pristine ethnic cultures, Roy emphasises
a global Islam that transcends ethnic and national divisions. He also
suggests that born-again Muslims in diaspora, whilst emphasising the
“individualization and reconstruction of identities”, come into conflict
with some of their fellow Muslims, emphasising their ethnic-religious
practices in a new environment (“Muslims in Europe” 28). Counter-
intuitively, Karim can be seen to represent a kind of born-again Muslim
by de-emphasising the ethno-nationalities of the first generation. In
addition to Roy’s “born-again Muslim” phenomenon, Shamsie also
seems to be echoing Rushdie’s idea of the translated man. Comparing
migration to translation, Rushdie says: “Having been borne across the
world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something
always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that
something can also be gained” (Imaginary Homelands 17). Having been
borne across the world, Karim’s reflections on his homeland and his
need to reclaim some link with it through interactive mapping accen-
tuates the fact that while the self might be physically separated from
home, there is always a connection with the spatial location of home.
Therefore, unlike his parents’ generation, Karim’s sense of belonging
after migration leads to new aggregations of identity.
Unlike members of his parents’ generation, Karim leaves Karachi
and travels to London, where he makes maps of his home city that
are symbols of longing both for his home and for his childhood
friend. Therefore Karim’s absence from Karachi highlights and chal-
lenges the limitations of territory-determined concepts of culture and
identity. Karim’s sense of belonging and his affiliation with homeland
and Pakistani identity never fade; maps forge a link between himself
and home. What is interesting in the case of Karim is that despite his
displacement, his maps connect home and abroad and in doing so
guarantee his return. He does not lose his connection with home, nor
is he willing to accept a hyphenated identity as his ultimate fate. Karim
also assures Raheen that “[y]ou’re the same, Raheen. The city is falling
apart and you’re the same. That’s why I sent you those maps. Because
I wanted you to find a way to see beyond the tiny circle you live in”
(244). The “tiny circle” that he refers to represents the class and ethnicity
that had previously separated Maheen and Zafar despite them living in
the same place.
This can be seen as an interesting development in the concept of map-
ping in the novel. Karim’s interactive mapping at the end of Kartography
highlights the tendency to problematise the political function of con-
ventional cartographies. The title of the novel, “Kartography,” also ges-
tures towards a non-normative or adapted understanding of mapping.
Reconsidering the 1971 civil war which forced Raheen’s father to break
off his engagement with Karim’s Bengali mother, he explains to Raheen
that this is “why I look at you and see him and can’t bear it or forgive
you or be with you … Oh, God, why weren’t we born orphans?”(244).
Karim’s rejection of the ethnically motivated conflicts that divided
Zafar and Maheen reminds us of the political function of conventional
cartographies. The separation of East and West Pakistan resulted in the
formation/redrawing of (geo)political boundaries, consequently divid-
ing nations (Pakistan and Bangladesh) on a conventional world map.
When figured like this, a conventional map can be seen as emblematic
of power structures that divide nations. Through his interactive map-
ping, Karim challenges the racism and ethnic divisions arising from the
regional transformations that are the result of conventional cartography.
As Martha Patricia Niño Mojica suggests:
A map is a model, an abstraction about what is a territory. In that

sense, it can also be a concept. Race is one of those concepts that
after a while becomes a map with rather arbitrary borderlines; it has
no foundation in reality. It has no origin. From this point of view it
is possible to subvert this power structure by creating your own maps
and tags. (127)
Karim’s Internet mapping, which is an effort to subvert political

power structures, is informed by Raheen’s idea of lunar streets “that say
more about Karachi than anything you’ll find on a street map” (330).
For example, a nameless alley behind Imam Baragh1 that appears “when
the lunar calendar enters the month of Muhurrum” provides Shia
women in purdah with a passage that can take them to Imam Baragh
“without being gazed upon by strangers” (330). Karachi’s map is incom-
plete without the historical significance of stories associated with such
seasonal streets.2 Raheen’s idea of lunar streets inspires Karim to create
a mode of Internet mapping – based on stories, memories and myths –
that he uses to reconstruct his own identity as well as to break down the
static territorial conception of the nation. Drawing upon Soja’s concept
of the “restructuring of the urban imaginary”, I argue that Karim,

through his map making, aims for a deterritorialisation and reterrito-
rialisation of “cultures and identity” (324). Karim’s Internet map links
locations to history, to the stories from past and present, and to culture,
tradition and relationships. In so doing, Karim’s mapping suggests the
arbitrariness of power invoked by traditional maps and borders, which
have the tendency to divide members of a single community on the
basis of location.
Benedict Anderson has famously argued that a nation is “imagined
because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most
of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). He suggests
that national identity is fabricated through shared heritage that con-
nect people of the same nation irrespective of their physical proximity
or distance. However, Anderson’s own definition of nation as an imag-
ined community becomes contradictory when he describes a nation
as limited because “even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a
billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond
which lie other nations” (7). By spatially limiting demographic entities,
he reinscribes nation within the narrow and vicious circle of territory.
Anderson ignores ways in which imagination shapes the behaviour of
members of a community beyond the confines of time and space. In
contrast to Anderson’s concept of nation as an imagined community,
Karim’s mapping gestures towards Soja’s urban imaginary, which allows
“deterritorialization and reterritorialization of cultures and identity”
(324) as mentioned above. Karim, through his interactive map of the
city, aims to frame Karachi as a “cosmopolis … [,] a construction of the
mind, a city/region in which there is genuine connection with, and
respect and space for, the cultural Other and possibility of working
together on matters of common destiny, a recognition of intertwined
fates” (Soja 230). Soja’s concept of cosmopolis is significant for consider-
ing ways in which Karim successfully responds to the problems associ-
ated with the megacity of Karachi,3 such as the physical structure of the
city and the spatial mapping of emotions, as I will elaborate.
As regards the physical structure of Karachi, Karim’s map-making
activity makes it possible to construct a map of Karachi, which is an
almost impossible task according to Shamsie. She describes the reality
of this city according to “the jumble, the illogic, the self-definition,
the quicksilver of the place” (131). This jumble and illogical reality of
Karachi owe a great deal to internal and external migrations within its
urban space, due to its increasing economic dynamism, the 1947 and
1971 Partitions, and the influx of Afghan mujahideen. Thus, any accu-
rate estimate of Karachi’s population and borders seems an impossibil-
ity. However, Karim’s letter collage and his hand-drawn map – both of
which attempt symbolically to represent what has happened in the city
of Karachi – help to construct an Internet map for such a jumbled and
illogical place.4 Most importantly, Karim’s map and letter collage juxta-
pose the simultaneous physical and social realities of the city and show
that he has never been oblivious to his home city. Like Raheen’s idea of
lunar streets, his maps “say more about Karachi than anything you’ll
find on a street map” (330). Many people in Karachi would never know
a nameless alley behind Imam Baragh that appears “when the lunar cal-
endar enters the month of Muhurrum”, which reminds Karachiites of
“Shia-Sunni fights” (330). Similarly, certain areas that remain under cur-
few are highlighted on the map, indicating the violence in the city. In a
letter collage there are also references to “Boat Basin as Khyaban-e-Jami”
and to the “number of people killed in Karachi’s violence”, which repre-
sent not just what Raheen calls “the luxury of being compassionate from
a distance”: rather, they reflect Karim’s attachment to his place of origin
(132–133). The letter collage that Karim sends to Raheen is an innovative
memory map: “We look at these maps, and our minds know just what
to do: take the information and extrapolate from it a place where they
can leap, play, gambol – without that distant province of our being, the
body, dragging them down” (Davis 10–11). James Corner, a landscape
architect, calls such cognitive mapping a “creative act that describes and
constructs the space we live in, a project that ‘reveals and realizes hidden
potential’”; hence cognitive mapping makes the “unmappable mappa-
ble” (qtd in Abrams and Hall 12).
The second important function of Karim’s interactive mapping, as
referred to above, is social and collective. Fredric Jameson’s aesthetic
of cognitive mapping emphasises the same potential for a collective
identity. According to Jameson, by inventing a new “mode of repre-
senting [we can] begin to grasp our positioning as individual and col-
lective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at
present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (qtd
in Abrams and Hall 20). The kind of cognitive map Karim and Raheen
want to construct is an interesting juxtaposition of places, memories
and remembered experiences which, according to Barbara Tversky, can
be called a “cognitive collage” in which “we make use of a multitude
of information, not just remembered experiences or remembered maps
of environments” (qtd in Abrams and Hall 177). This is what Karim is
aiming at through his interactive mapping.
Furthermore, Karim redraws the map of Karachi in a manner that

reformulates the collective identity of the nation in an age in which
nations are also forging links with their diaspora communities in cyber-
space. Karim’s whimsical technique of navigation draws a nexus between
national and diaspora identities and cross-hatches them with ethnic
identities and social relations. This is reflected in the novel when Raheen
asks Karim: “when did love become so dependent on geography?” and
Karim, recalling the 1971 civil violence and its implications for his and
Raheen’s families, replies: “When personality started to change with loca-
tion” (298). Karim’s Internet mapping proves to be a vinculum between
all the members of his community across the globe and it also aspires to
connect people beyond the class and ethnic differences that separated
Karim’s parents’ generation in 1971. Karim and Raheen’s friend Jake
also highlights the obsolescence of conventional geographical mapping
techniques to Karim: “the word ‘maps’ is an anagram of ‘spam’” (295).
This shift in emphasis from the notion of stable maps to mapping
as a process is foregrounded in the novel when Karim assures Raheen
that maps are “amazing things. They define a city as a single territorial
unit; they give a sense of connectedness” (244). J.B. Harley – the most
influential historian of cartography by virtue of bringing about a cross-
disciplinary approach to the field – also highlights the power of the
mapping process: “Far from holding up a simple mirror of nature that is
true or false, maps redescribe the world – like any other document – in
terms of relations of power and of cultural practices, preferences, and
priorities” (qtd in Abrams and Hall 12). This cross-disciplinary approach
is reflected in Karim’s Internet map, as he says to Raheen:
“We’ll make an interactive map on the Internet. You start with a

basic street map, OK, but everywhere there are links. Click here, you
get sound files of Karachiites telling stories of what it’s like to live in
different parts of town. Click there, you get a visual of any particu-
lar street. Click again, the camera zooms in and you see a rock or a
leaf or a billboard that means something to that street. Click, you
see streets that exist seasonally, like your lunar street. Click, you see
which sections are under curfew. Click, you hear a poem. Click, you
see a painting. Choice of languages in which you can read the thing.
Sound files in all kinds of dialects. Strong on graphics for people who
are illiterate. Just wait, Raheen, this is going to be amazing.” (337)
Madeleine de Scudéry’s theory of the spatial mapping of emotions is

also relevant in Raheen’s and Karim’s context. She describes the spatial
mapping of emotions in terms of the intimate ties between friends.

Invoking Scudery, Pinder notes, “Place names take the form of activities
and states of mind as the viewer is invited to imagine taking different
potential paths through this land towards Tenderness. It depicts a fluid
space of movement and emotion that emphasizes subjectivity, intimate
experience and stages of love” (458). The nexus that Scudéry draws
between emotions and spatial mapping usefully explains the ration-
ale behind Karim’s maps: maps are not just about naming places and
streets but about the red eyes of the separating Karim and Raheen, about
the language of anagrams that the two soul mates share, about the fears,
and about the tears that Raheen mentions: “some of my tears were his
tears and some of his tears were mine” (111). Thus Karim’s mapping can-
not be visualised as “a technology, but a strategy” which through its “cre-
ative problem-solving and visualization capabilities” (Crampton 27) seeks
to portray Karachi in terms of human relations, social structures, culture
and identity. Nicole Strenger observes: “cyberspace is like Oz – it is, we get
there, but it has no location; it opens up a space for collective restoration,
and for peace … our future can only take on a luminous dimension!” (qtd
in Featherstone and Burrows 135). However, for Shamsie, cyberspace is
not a “utopian temptation”. As Robins contends: “Not all virtual realities
are quite unrealistic … There are others with a more pragmatic and practi-
cal and political disposition who have more to contribute to our under-
standing of the relation between cyberspace and the real world” (qtd in
Featherstone and Burrows 147). My reading of Kartography with regards
to Karim’s memory maps corroborates Robin’s observations. It is because
of this connection between Karim’s cyberspace and the real world that
his home city is not lost in migrant space. Karim’s Internet mapping is
not just about naming places; it is about relationships and feelings, and
it bridges the gaps between people divided by territorial limitations and
cruel ethnic and political realities.
For Shamsie, then, home cities need not be lost; Burnt Shadows is to
some extent an exception, as I will discuss. Characters may be distanced
from the homeland temporarily, but ultimately the lost city or home-
land is regained. Shamsie inculcates a strong sense of homecoming in
her characters so that they feel like strangers in a foreign land. Nostalgic
feelings are strong enough to attract characters back home. Shamsie’s
oeuvre is also distinctive in its treatment of nostalgia; a character’s long-
ing for home never fades away irrespective of whether the nostalgia
is accompanied by melancholy or pleasure. Nostalgia is both alluring
and repulsive. Whereas Karim’s burgeoning obsession with map mak-
ing in Kartography is informed by the nostalgic feelings that ultimately
guarantee his return, Hiroko’s nostalgia in Burnt Shadows makes her a

cosmopolitan who spends her life moving from one part of the world
to another. Nevertheless, a wide range of characters become victims of
circumstances that make them feel homesick. For example, in Broken
Verses, Ed, a Pakistani Muslim, becomes an alien in the US after the
fall of the Twin Towers. Similarly, in Burnt Shadows, Raza – a Pakistani
working as a mercenary for a private security firm affiliated to the CIA –
becomes suspicious in the eyes of his US colleague, Steve. Abdullah, an
Afghan immigrant in the US, is perceived as a terrorist and a fanatic by
an American woman. As a result of these bitter experiences, both are
forced to contemplate their Muslim identities in a state of exile. I discuss
these characters in detail in the next two sections.
Highlighting the same pathology of dislocation and a resultant mel-
ancholic nostalgia, Paul Gilroy suggests that “when race becomes an
issue, a melancholic tone becomes audible… the disquiet over immi-
gration [is] the result… not of racism, but of the disruption of an old
experience of home, and a loss of enchantment which [makes] home a
place of safety and consolation” (125–126). However, I would argue that
Shamsie’s treatment of melancholy is distinctive in that it has healing
power as opposed to the notion of melancholia presented by Gilroy
and German psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich.
With reference to the German reactions to the Second World War II,
Alexander and Mitscherlich observe that:
The ability to recall whole segments of the national past faded away,
leaving destructive blank spaces in individual autobiographies and cre-
ating patterns of intergenerational complicity and conflict that con-
tributed to a culture of alienation from and indifference not only to
the past but to anything that entails responsibility. (qtd in Gilroy 107)
Such indifference and alienation, reflecting a Freudian “diseased con-

science”, (Khanna n.p.) are scarcely to be found in Shamsie’s novels.
According to Ranjana Khanna, “[m]elancholia … is not simply a
crippling attachment to a past that acts like a drain of energy on the
present … the melancholic’s critical agency, and the peculiar tem-
porality that drags it back and forth at the same time, acts toward
the future” (ibid.). Using Khanna’s observations, I would argue that
melancholic feelings in Shamsie’s characters are also future-oriented,
irrespective of the fact that they are attached to a past that cannot be
forgotten. In Kartography, Karim’s departure from his homeland does
not in itself generate his real self, but he does not accept a hyphenated
identity either. The effect of melancholia on Karim can be seen in his

cartographic “production of utopia” (Khanna, n.p.). However, as I have
argued, Karim’s utopian cyberspace is not divorced from reality. He
initiates a lifelong project of mapping a city “that’s always changing”
(338) to emphasise how any notion of identity (both at home and in
diaspora) must extend beyond the confines of geographical boundaries.
Whereas Karim’s strong nostalgic feelings for his home city of Karachi
deconstruct ethno-nationalist identities in national contexts, Aliya’s
attachment to her home and cultural identity in Salt and Saffron decon-
structs racist binaries in diaspora, as I will discuss in the next section.
Dismantling the East–West binary
According to Rehana Ahmed, Shamsie’s continued lived and narrative

involvement with her home city, Karachi, stimulates the use of foreign
land as a space that serves paradoxically to highlight the importance of
homeland in the lives of her characters. As I mentioned at the begin-
ning of this chapter, Shamsie’s second-generation characters tend to
deconstruct an East–West (marginal–central) binary in their diasporic
contexts, and in doing so they refute a purported “clash of civilisa-
tions”. I argue in this section that Shamsie does this through what is
negatively perceived by Ahmed as the abstraction of global space in her
novels (“Unsettling Cosmopolitanisms” 12–28). I suggest that by down-
playing the significance of Western space in her novels, which tends to
give the impression that she is undermining the space of Britain that her
characters inhabit, Shamsie seeks to emphasise the overwhelming influ-
ence of her characters’ indigenous culture, which guarantees their return
to roots, albeit through a process of “rerouting” (Clifford 302–338).
This contrasts Ahmed’s more critical response, when she suggests that
Shamsie “downplays the importance of England and America in her
fiction, claiming that these locations are present only because they are
the places from which people return to Karachi or to which people go
and become cut off from home or fear becoming cut off from home”
(“Unsettling Cosmopolitanisms” 12–28). According to Ahmed, cosmo-
politan philosophy is thereby consciously suppressed in Shamsie’s early
works which foreground the local space of Karachi; Salt and Saffron
stands as an example of this abstraction of Western space.
Salt and Saffron is a saga of the Dard-e-Dil family, one of Karachi’s aris-
tocratic nawab5 families. The story is narrated by Aliya, who has recently
returned from the US. She has inherited the craft of storytelling from
her family. Interweaving the stories of her aristocratic ancestors with
those of her living generation, Aliya’s narrative foregrounds Pakistan’s

class-divided society in which neither her own relationship with Khaleel
(a young man whom she meets on her flight from the US to Pakistan,
and who is from Liaqatabad, a socially inferior area of Karachi city) nor
her twin-sister Mariam’s relationship with a cook, Masood, is deemed
suitable by her elite family. Aliya falls in love with Khaleel, despite
being fully aware of her family’s pride and class prejudice. Therefore,
she tries to find a resolution to challenges facing her relationship with
Khaleel by reconstructing Mariam’s relationship with Masood. This can
be seen as Shamsie’s effort to deconstruct the rigid class boundaries that
characterise Pakistani society.
Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist-based spatial analysis, Ahmed
argues that in Salt and Saffron Shamsie seems to overlook the impact of
“transnational movement on the subject’s class identification” through
a deliberate “abstraction of geographical space beyond the Indian
subcontinent”. Emphasising the significance of transnational move-
ment and foreign space, Ahmed argues that Mariam’s and Masood’s
relationship is “deeply shocking to Mariam’s highly privileged family
in Pakistani society” (“Unsettling Cosmopolitanisms”14–15). But in
the case of Khaleel and Aliya, displacement to a foreign land allows
their relationship to flourish by subverting the class barriers that
might otherwise have separated them in Pakistan. For Ahmed it is
his “transnationalism, signalled by his ease of movement across three
continents, as well as his identification as an American, [that] enable
Khaleel to transgress the barriers of class, materialized in the lines that
mark out the district of Liaquatabad”. Similarly, it is Khaleel’s “presence
with Aliya in Britain that makes possible the beginnings of their rela-
tionship” and thus subverts “the class boundaries which separate them
in Pakistan” (“Unsettling Cosmopolitanisms” 16).
In contradistinction to what Ahmed says, I would argue that Khaleel’s
displacement to a foreign land and his transnationalism may be respon-
sible for the beginning of his relationship with Aliya, but the couple
are only united when they return to their homeland. A certain kind of
intimacy required to bind people into relationships remains missing
from their life until they return to their culture of origin. During her
absence from Pakistan, Aliya also yearns nostalgically for the intimacy
required to develop a lasting relationship: “Samia lay down and rested
her head against my back. More than anything else, more than man-
goes, gol guppas, nihari and naans, more than cricket mania, more
than monsoon rains, more than crabbing beneath a star-clustered sky,
what I missed about Karachi was the intimacy of bodies” (14). Devon
Campbell Hall defines this desire for intimacy as “melancholic long-

ing for the culture of origin, in which the self feels complete, having
moved beyond the dislocating experience of feeling overtly foreign in a
strange land” (175). Khaleel and Aliya’s relationship achieves resolution
when Khaleel finally returns home. His intimacy with Aliya’s nawab
family bridges the gap between his middle-class background and Aliya’s
elite status. On the other hand, Mariam and Masood’s relationship fails
to materialise because of their “disappearance to a space that remains
mysterious and mythical both to Mariam’s family and to the reader”
(Ahmed, “Unsettling Cosmopolitanisms” 16). That neutral space in the
novel, which is highlighted as a foreign/Western space, fails to provide
a deus ex machina to Mariam and Masood’s relationship in the novel. In
Kartography, friendship and love between Raheen and Karim similarly
begins when their mothers place them spine to spine in a cradle. In
fact, they are also born in love with each other. The love between Karim
and Raheen grows with the years that mark Karim “as ex-pat and not
as a Karachiite” (125), but they are not united until Karim regains his
native home.
Highlighting the repressed role of the West in Salt and Saffron,
Ahmed further argues that the “use of the West as a neutral space of
convenience and enablement by the Pakistani characters could be
seen to disturb or even reverse the narrative of global capitalism where
First world uses Third World as an exploitable resource” (“Unsettling
Cosmopolitanisms” 24). According to Ahmed, by abstracting the space
of Britain and the US in her novels, Shamsie tends to reduce:
Britain and America to a mere means for enabling a narrative that

she claims is ‘only really ever about’ the Indian subcontinent. She
writes that this reversal of the functions of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in her
works ‘rather alters the politics of the situation’, gesturing towards
the possibility of a challenge to the politics of Empire in her treat-
ment of global space. (“Unsettling Cosmopolitanisms” 24–25)
I would argue rather that Shamsie does not simply aim at reversing the
roles of the East and the West, as Ahmed claims. Reflecting Bhabha’s
concept of colonial mimicry, transculturation provides Shamsie’s char-
acters with social spaces in which they can create their own version of
culture. In Salt and Saffron, on her way from Heathrow to her family flat
in London, when Aliya tells the English cab driver that she is a Pakistani,
he mutters “[b]all tamperers” (5), and Aliya responds with silence.
Aliya’s silence over the driver’s comment has been misunderstood by
Ahmed as “global subalternity”, because in Ahmed’s observation, Aliya

was “scarred by a history of racial violence and oppression” (“Unsettling
Cosmopolitanisms” 17). I would rather suggest that Aliya’s muteness in
response to the taxi driver’s comment reflects the strong cultural roots
that her Western education could not alter. As Aliya contemplates:
I responded with silence. Not the kind of silence with which my

cousin, Mariam, filled her days, but rather the silence of my grand-
mother, which was meant to inform those who received it of the
lowliness of their stature. Dadi always accompanied those silences
with an upward tilt of her head, as though she were posing for the
head of the coin. (Salt and Saffron 5)
Living in a multicultural Western society and with an Anglicised edu-

cation, Aliya is still an Asian who displays the elite class manners and
snobbery of her superior Dard-e-Dil family. Moreover, as an Asian, she
rejects the very idea of being observed and judged by a Western cab
driver, and in doing so she liberates herself from a “gaze of otherness”
(Bhabha, Location 88–89). Contrary to a manifestation of “global subal-
ternity”, Aliya’s silence becomes the powerful voice of Asian presence in
Western society by reversing:
in part the colonial appropriation by now producing a partial vision

of the colonizer’s presence; a gaze of otherness, that shares the acuity
of the genealogical gaze which, as Foucault describes it, liberates mar-
ginal elements and shatters the unity of man’s being through which
he extends his sovereignty. (Bhabha, Location 88–89)
Aliya, by ignoring the cab driver’s comment, puts him in a position

where “the observer becomes observed and ‘partial’ representation
rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence”
(Bhabha, Location 89).
Shamsie’s novel subverts the whole practice of labelling the West as
central and the East (in this context Pakistan) as marginal, by marginalis-
ing the West in its own territory. The host community, in this example, is
othered by ‘the other’. Therefore, Aliya’s silence becomes a powerful “cri-
tique of dominant historical representation” in an “interventionist way”
(Morton 51, 64). Spivak’s conclusion that “the subaltern cannot speak” –
even when the “subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she is
not able to be heard” – needs reconsideration (cited in Morton 66). What
we might describe as Aliya’s voiced silence discombobulates the powerful
presence of the West. It is in this way that Aliya’s silence is “the silenc-
ing of Britain as a social space” (Ahmed, “Unsettling Cosmopolitanisms”
19). She remains unaffected by British culture. By presenting London as
“neutral soil” (18), Shamsie is interested in how people from different
places may carry with them the history of where they are from.
A similar abstraction of the space of Britain is highlighted in
Kartography. Karim, during his stay in London, is more interested in
making maps of Karachi than anything in London. Moreover, there is
hardly any reference to the city of London during the years that Karim
and his family stay there. By presenting foreign space as “neutral”,
Shamsie critically decentres the former colonisers. By marginalising
Western space, she questions the authenticity of authority, echoing
what Bhabha has argued in the context of Orientalist stereotypes.
Shamsie’s abstraction of Western space can be described as what Bhabha
calls the “mockery” of representation: “what emerges between mimesis
and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the
monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model,
that power which supposedly makes it imitable” (Location 87–88).
Shamsie mocks the power of the West not simply by reversing the
roles of the East and the West, but by downplaying the importance of
Western space in most of her novels. For example, originally “Shamsie
had planned for Broken Verses to begin in London, but she found her
fictional London ‘sluggish’. As she explains: ‘It was only when I started
writing about Karachi that it really started fizzing’” (Brown para 9).
What is interesting in Shamsie’s treatment of culture and space is that
rather than making her characters adapt to foreignness, she alters the
whole notion of feeling at home in a foreign land; her characters feel
alienated in foreign lands, which ultimately brings them back home.
This, I argue, is the main reason for the abstraction of foreign space.
In this sense, Shamsie’s novels demonstrate the uncanniness of culture,
as Bhabha argues:
Culture is heimlich, with its disciplinary generalizations, its mimetic

narratives, its homologous empty time, its seriality, its progress, its
customs and coherence. But cultural authority is also unheimlich,
for to be distinctive, significatory, influential and identifiable, it
has to be translated, disseminated, differentiated, interdisciplinary,
intertextual, international, inter-racial. (Location 136–137)
David Huddart concurs: “The uncanny … opens a space for us to

reconsider how we have come to be who we are … [Culture] is [also]
unhomely because it is always changing: it is always being made mean-

ingful by others, those to whom it apparently does not belong” (83).
The concept of uncanniness works interestingly in Shamsie’s novels. In
Salt and Saffron, the fact that her characters feel unhomely in a foreign
space is evident from the way that they remain unaffected by Western
culture. Accordingly, Aliya’s silenced snobbery and Karim’s interest in
maps of Karachi during his stay in London help them to know who
they are and to preserve their identities and traditions in a foreign land.
Bhabha identifies that this uncanny “inspires us [Third-World writers]
to re-evaluate our identities” which have previously been othered in
foreign spaces (Huddart 83). Foreign culture is made meaningful and
homely not by those to whom it belongs, but by “the Other”.
By reversing the concept of otherness through Aliya’s silenced snob-
bery and Karim’s interest in mapping Karachi, Shamsie rebuts the
concept of ‘the Other’ in the West that marginalises Muslims (here the
context exemplified by the comment of the taxi-driver is the pre-9/11
xenophobic imaginary of a majority white population). This binary
stereotyping on the basis of ethnicity and race is, unsurprisingly, one
thing that makes Pakistanis nostalgic about home. In the next sec-
tion, I shift the focus to post-9/11 settings and examine ways in which
Muslims are othered against the backdrop of more recent Islamophobia
narratives.
After 9/11: Islamophobia and Pakistani Muslim

identities in home and diaspora
Much of the post-9/11 second-generation literary output engages with

the ways in which the stigmatisation of (Pakistani) Muslims on the
basis of ethnicity (discussed in the previous section), has morphed
into stigmatisation on the basis of faith. In the post-9/11 world, xeno-
phobia has taken the form of Islamophobia that, according to Meer
and Modood, accentuates the “new sociological relevance” of religion
in relation to the issues of “community identity, stereotyping, socio-
economic location, political conflict and so forth” (qtd in Sayyid and
Vakil 83). In order to interrogate this new sociological relevance of reli-
gion, this section highlights a shift from pre-9/11 settings and national
socio-political scenarios to post-9/11 settings and a global scenario.
I am particularly interested in ways in which Shamsie’s novels highlight
the misrepresentation of Islam and South Asians in the aftermath of
9/11. I argue that the ‘war on terror’ rhetoric has furthered anti-Islamic
sentiments and that the stereotypical demonisation of Muslims at an
international level has become a cliché. This is supported by Nasar

Meer’s observation:
The increase in personal abuse and everyday racism since 9/11 and
the London bombings, in which the perceived ‘Islamic-ness’ of the
victims is the central reason for the abuse, regardless of the truth
of this presumption (resulting in Sikhs and others with an ‘Arab’
appearance being attacked for ‘looking like Bin Laden’)” suggests
that racial and religious discrimination are much more interlinked
than the current application of civil and criminal legislation
allows. (72)
Shamsie’s novels aptly highlight such racist propaganda that depicts

Islam as a religion of violence, where (Islamic) nationalism becomes a
metaphor for terrorism. They also show the wide-ranging ontological
and epistemological effects of this propaganda in the form of increased
communal tensions and the exclusion and estrangement of Pakistani
Muslims/communities in the West. At the same time, Shamsie connects
this international fear of Muslims in the West to the Islamisation of
Pakistan during Zia’s regime and to the political tensions in Pakistan and
the subcontinent since the 1947 Partition. The rise of religious extrem-
ism during Zia’s era in conjunction with his support of the Afghan
mujahideen is the deeper context to hostile attitudes towards Islam in
the West. Linking local, regional and global conflicts as well as tying the
past to the present, I read Shamsie’s novels as a robust rebuttal of the
binarism proposed by George Bush: “Either you’re with us or you’re with
the terrorists” (“Transcript of President Bush’s Address”, n.p.).
The yearning and nostalgia with which Shamsie’s characters regard
Karachi has serious implications in the post-9/11 context. I have already
emphasised the socio-political significance of Karachi in Shamsie’s nov-
els with reference to ethnocentrism. But as I am arguing throughout this
book, in order to understand Pakistan’s place in the post-9/11 world, it
is necessary to keep returning to the Zia period. In this section I will
foreground ways in which ethnic and sectarian conflicts have affected
contemporary Pakistan by linking these conflicts to Zia’s Islamic reviv-
alist project in the late 1970s, a period considered to be a precursor
of the ongoing clash between different ethnic and sectarian identi-
ties. Karim’s efforts to deconstruct ethno-nationalists identities within
Karachi, as discussed in the previous section, in fact gesture forward
towards the implications of reductive (Islamic and ethnic) nationalisms
for Pakistanis in the post-9/11 world. The recent persecution of religious
minorities – particularly Shia Muslim Hazaras in Quetta (2013) and

the burning of Christians’ houses in the Badami Bagh area of Lahore
(2013) over alleged blasphemy – epitomises the cultural intolerance that
Shamsie portrayed in Karachi of the late 1980s and 1990s.6 This growing
ethnocentrism and sectarianism in Pakistan – which has repercussions
for contemporary Pakistan in the aftermath of 9/11 – owes a great deal
to Zia’s Islamisation and extremist religious establishment. Therefore,
Shamsie contextualises the post-9/11 stereotypical demonisation of
Muslims in relation to Islamic extremism and ethnocentrism within
Pakistan since the late 1970s, as well as in relation to US-led propaganda
surrounding the ‘war on terror’.
Bearing these interlinked contexts in mind, it is possible to argue that
the nostalgia with which Shamsie’s diasporic characters regard their
places of origin has serious implications in the post-9/11 context. The
fall of the Twin Towers has sundered the world into discordant cultural
spaces. At this historical juncture, as Shamsie puts it in Broken Verses, all
the lessons of global culture became moribund and “you stopped being
an individual and started being an entire religion” (45). Muslims in
the West are caught in the process of redefining what it means to be a
Muslim; they are aware of the fact that just saying Islam is a religion of
peace rather than of war is not going to suffice and that more is being
asked of them. In the post-9/11 era, religion has become an important
marker of Muslim identity. In fact, it is hard to be a Muslim in a post-
9/11 world and “not be aware of Muslimness” (Kramatschek n.p.).
Shamsie flags up the same dilemma in an interview:
religious identity defines you at certain times – and the post 9/11
era has certainly been one of these times … And it has nothing to
do with Islam, in a sense, or whether you believe anything in the
Koran, or whether you fast or pray. You get asked: are you a Muslim?
Yes! And you hear all kinds of things being said about Muslims. And
you start to feel yourself being Muslim in a way you never felt before.
People will say: So what is it about Islam that makes people turn to
violence? (Kramatschek n.p)
The idea of ‘Muslimness’ that Shamsie refers to here registers the stig-
matisation of Muslims in the West against the backdrop of ‘war on ter-
ror’ rhetoric that has accelerated a shift from Orientalist epistemology
to terrorist ontology. As a result of ongoing Islamophobia in the West,
negative images of Muslims have continued to shape Western attitudes
and speech in such a way that the figure of the Muslim has become a
metaphor for barbarism and violence; Muslimness thus becomes syn-

onymous with terror, a position which I term a terrorist ontology. As a
part of the same phenomena, Pakistan has emerged (in much of the US
media at least) as a leading locus of terrorism in the world (see Poole 57,
75). Such media representations have inevitably influenced and shaped
the majority of Western perceptions in a way that means “on the one
hand, there is the assumption that this religion is deranged and on the
other, there is the assumption that you must speak up for it. Both of
these situations are uncomfortable” (Kramatschek n.p.).
Such stereotyping in the post-9/11 world has triggered hostile feel-
ings towards Islam and Muslims. Islamophobia misrepresents Muslims
as a monolithic group. Rarely is a distinction made between Islam as
a religion and the Islam of hardliners such as the Taliban and Islamic
extremists, but this is a distinction that Shamsie highlights in Broken
Verses. Aasmaani asks Mirza: “what happened to your love affair with
all those poets in love with God?” He waves his “hand dismissively”
and tells Aasmaani that “God has become the most dangerous subject
of all. I don’t even think of Him anymore.”. Aasmaani ponders and
questions: “Leave him [God] in the hands of extremists, is that your
plan?” (216). Aasmaani’s question refers to the concept of extremist
militant jihad which, according to Shamsie, was revived in General
Zia’s regime in the 1980s due to the influx of Afghan immigrants into
Pakistan, and to the dominance of the Taliban in some parts of the
country (Kramatschek n.p.).
The plot of Broken Verses revolves around the quest of Aasmaani
Inqalab to unravel the sudden and mysterious disappearance of her
iconic feminist mother, Samina Akram. An inspirational Pakistani
political activist, Samina spends most of her life in exile because of her
relationship with the poet Nazim, who has been silenced for exposing
the Pakistani government’s injustices, repression and religious fanati-
cism during General Zia’s regime. As the daughter of a political activist
who is torn between the demands of children and the need to pursue
her own life, Aasmaani suffers the consequences of sharing a parent
with the world. She takes a job at a cable television network as a quiz
show researcher where she is introduced to Ed, the handsome son of
a famous retired actress, Shehnaz Saeed, who abandoned her career to
look after her child. Ed has recently returned from New York after ten
years there because he, like many other Muslims, became a victim of
the 9/11 tragedy. Now he is helping his mother to make a triumphant
comeback. Through her son, Saeed passes along a series of letters –
apparently written in the secret code used by Samina and the poet – to
Aasmaani, who becomes obsessed with the letters and tries to translate
them, searching for remnants of truth about her mother’s mysterious
disappearance. Therefore, Broken Verses focuses on both pre-9/11 and
post-9/11 settings so as to contextualise Islamophobia narratives in
relation to the ruthless Islamisation of the Pakistani state and the
subsequent rise of religious extremism in the region.
Shamsie’s novelistic representations contextualise the post-9/11 fram-
ing of Muslims and Islamophobia in relation to Zia’s politics of Islamic
reforms, his support of Afghan mujahideen and to US interventions in
the region since the late 1970s, thereby foregrounding political and
historical causes that underlie the recent global stereotyping against
Muslims as well as “war on terror” rhetoric. In the novel, Shamsie links
the manipulation of Islam by Zia to international politics. She accentu-
ates the effect of the US’s backing of this Islamic resurgence because
of its own Cold War rival (the Soviet Union), and the way that the US
manipulated Islamic fundamentalists against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
In Broken Verses a conversation between Samina and Maulana Moin Haq
gestures towards the repercussions of Zia’s participation in the Afghan
jihad, which was informed by a dominant paradigm of affiliation with
the Muslim ummah. Samina contends: “you spout phrases like ‘the
unity of ummah’ as you hand those boys … ready-to-be-brainwashed …
What happens after Afghanistan, have you considered that? Where do
they go next, those global guerrillas with their allegiance to a common
cause and their belief in violence as the most effective way to take on
the enemy?” (285–286). The novel provides a stimulating account of
Zia’s manipulation of religion for political reasons, which affected the
whole nation in two ways.
Firstly, madrassas (Islamic seminaries) established in Pakistan during
Zia’s regime for the training of mujahideen have remained a target for
the US Army after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, as some
radicals trained in these madrassas morphed into al-Qaeda and other
terrorist groups that are currently confronting the West. Moreover, this
radical atmosphere has shaped the nation’s way of reacting towards
any offences against Islam, whether these offences are global Muslim
concerns such as the “Rushdie Affair”, the Danish cartoon controversy,
the derogatory YouTube video Innocence of Muslims (2012), or indig-
enous protests against the Blasphemy Laws or the Hudood Ordinance.
Broken Verses considers repercussions of the Islamisation of Pakistan
through the character of Samina. While protesting against the Hudood
Ordinance and the “Islamic Law of Evidence” (92–94), which she
describes as the “misogynist deployment of religion to assert control
over women” (Ahmed, Morey and Yaqin 203), Samina becomes the
victim of a mullah dictator whose government aims to “sen[d] violent
tremors down the spine of the women’s movement … Zia’s Islam con-
cerned itself primarily with striking down the rights of women and
befriending fundamentalists” (Broken Verses 138). Similarly, Samina’s
friend Shehnaz Saeed refuses to be “one of those women the beards
approve of” (Broken Verses 59). Both of these women challenge the patri-
archal interpretation of Islamic Laws under Zia’s government. There is
no denying that Islamic radicalism and the culture of intolerance inau-
gurated by Zia continue to have significant social, cultural and political
momentum in contemporary Pakistan.
Secondly, Zia’s Islamisation of Pakistan divided the nation along
ethnic and religious lines. In turn, the sectarian acrimony and ethnic
violence of the 1980s have threatened the stability of domestic space
by promoting a culture of intolerance towards minorities and ethnic
identities as I discussed in Chapter 2 as well as with reference to the civil
unrest of the sprawling megalopolis of Karachi. Karachi is an important
city in Shamsie’s major works for the same reasons as it is in Khan’s. As
do Khan’s, Shamsie’s novels illuminate the ethnic and socio-political
conundrums that Karachiites face today; these include the influx of
Afghan immigrants and conflicts between various ethnic and sectar-
ian groups. Pakistan thus slides towards cultural and religious intoler-
ance. In one of her interviews, Shamsie says: “In Pakistan we feel very
strongly that a certain kind of history didn’t start on 9/11. It started in
Afghanistan in the 1980s and carried on from there; 9/11 was part of
that history” (Kramatschek n.p.). For Shamsie, this history dates back
to General Zia’s regime:
We are all General Zia’s generation, all the writers you mentioned. I was
four when he came to power and 14 when he died. He was my child-
hood; he was the Pakistan I grew up in. So I think for all of us there
is a real interest in looking at how we got here. How did the nation
get to this point? And we see the large figure of Zia and want to go
back and look at those years. (Kramatschek n.p.)
Shamsie’s continued affiliation with her homeland and her keen eye
for the socio-political situation of Pakistan are evident in her oeuvre,
which engages with ethnic violence, class discrimination, religious fun-
damentalism, martial law and the snobberies of political elites. With
regard to the political orientation of Pakistani-affiliated fiction, Bruce
King has argued that the “authors living abroad seemed concerned
with affirming their origins even when criticising Pakistan and its tra-
ditions”. He suggests that writers of Pakistani origin “avoid addressing
this theme of cause and effect directly … [because] it would call into
question their own assertion of identity” (688).
I would argue instead that a close reading of Shamsie’s texts reveals
that she does not write in order to portray a positive image of Pakistan
to the West. Her three novels, In the City by the Sea, Kartography and
Broken Verses, challenge the military dictatorship. In the City by the Sea
delves into the mind of Hassan, an adolescent whose world has been
shattered by the imprisonment of his beloved Mamoon Salman, a polit-
ical leader heading a party that stands against the corruption rampant
in the country. Through this narrative, Shamsie criticises the suppres-
sion of democracy in Pakistan by successive military regimes.7 Salman
Mamoon, who is presented as the darling of the masses and contrasted
with a sunken-eyed General, identifies “[t]he inability of democracies to
succeed in this country. The cycle of failure” (209). In the novel, Hassan
poses a seemingly innocent question: “Why exactly is everyone so wor-
ried about the military? I mean, I know the President isn’t nice, and
he’s put you under house-arrest and all that, but what’s he going to do?
I mean, why is everyone so scared?” (149). Hassan, in his anxiety, flags
up the long-term repercussions for Pakistan in the wake of Islamisation.
His questions gesture towards the extraordinary variety of events
that Pakistanis witnessed as a consequence of Zia’s policy to Islamise
Pakistan. The tensions between sectarian and ethnic groups that have
manifested themselves in violence in Karachi since the 1980s are due to
Zia’s affiliation to the Sunni version of Islam, the imposition of a quota
system, the promotion of a culture of intolerance towards minorities such
as Ahmadis and Christians, the promulgation of the Blasphemy Law and
the rise of Kalashnikov culture and religious extremism due to the influx
of Afghan mujahideen. I discussed this Islamisation–ethnocentrism nexus
in Chapter 2. Shamsie is also interested in these intersections between
Islam, ethnicity, sectarianism and state policies that drove Pakistan
towards Islamic fundamentalism under Zia, and which have profound
repercussions for contemporary Pakistan.
Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows accentuate the repercussions of the
ruthless Islamisation of Pakistan that these earlier novels map in order
to relate regional, political and historical grievances to global set-
tings. Like Khan, Shamsie draws upon those relations that exemplify
what is termed by Appadurai as “the geography of anger”. Reflecting
upon the nexus between post-9/11 narratives of terror and the long-
standing regional and local histories of India and Pakistan, Appadurai
has argued that the “geography of anger is … the spatial outcome of

complex interactions between faraway events and proximate fears,
between old histories and new provocations, between rewritten borders
and unwritten orders” (Fear 100). According to Appadurai, xenophobia
against Muslims does not merely exist in the West. It has been rampant
in South Asia since the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan at both
individual and state levels. At an individual level, this is reflected in
Burnt Shadows through the conversation between Raza’s neighbours,
Bilal and Altamash: “It’s not funny, Altamash explained. In India when
they want to insult Muslims they call us Pakistani. Bilal had laughed
out aloud. In Pakistan when they want to insult Muhajirs they call us
Indian” (190).
Similar narratives of intercultural rivalry can be found at the inter-
state level. The communal violence in Bombay in December 1992
and January 1993 resulting from the destruction of the Babri Mosque
in Ayodhya, and the Indo–Pak conflict over Kashmir since 1947, are
significant examples of events that prepared the ground for grand
narratives of terror after 9/11. Such territorial tensions exemplify “the
volatile relationship between the maps of national and global politics
(largely produced by official institutions and procedures) and the maps
of sacred national space (produced by political and religious parties)”
which consequently become “fractals of wider perspectives and images”
(Appadurai, Fear 100–101). Appadurai provides a compelling explana-
tion of Hindu–Muslim rivalry in the efforts of the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) that launched a national campaign “to mobilize sentiment against
Muslim rights within India, the Muslim state of Pakistan, and Islamic
presence throughout the world” (Fear 94). The most striking aspect of
this campaign was that in order to reinforce negative stereotypes about
Muslims, the BJP’s “effort was enriched by the infusion of language
taken from the global “war on terror”, which, for the BJP and its allies,
became one and the same as the national campaign to reduce Muslims
to a humiliated and ghettoized minority” (94–95). Shamsie illustrates
that these narratives of regional intercultural rivalry between Muslims
and Hindus within the subcontinent contribute towards increasing
xenophobia in the West. As Appadurai argues:
National politics, global alliances, regional tensions between states –

all come into new relations which exemplify the ways in which the
geography of anger is formed. Such geographies were produced and
transformed throughout the world after 9/11. In every case, they
brought together long-standing regional and local histories, national
and transnational political tensions, and global and international

pressures and coalitions. (Fear 99)
Burnt Shadows not only recapitulates the stories of the 1947 Partition,
migration, and ethnic violence within Pakistan and between India and
Pakistan, but also excoriates Pakistan’s involvement in the Afghan jihad,
which has had serious implications for Pakistan. In the novel, Hiroko
makes a comment that “‘Islamization’ was a word everyone recognized
as a political tool of a dictator and yet they still allowed their lives to be
changed by it” (182). Hiroko’s comment evokes references to multiple
problems that the Pakistani state has faced since the late 1970s as a
result of Zia’s politically motivated Islamisation policy. Besides sectar-
ian acrimony and ethnic violence, Pakistan has paid an enormous price
for the jihad in Afghanistan. As Shamsie argues, the emergence of the
Taliban’s power in Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan are the fruits of
Zia’s era:
Pakistan, which is by no means a superpower, is also very account-

able for what happened in Afghanistan and has played a very dirty
game. I hope that those sections of the book [Burnt Shadows] that
are set in the 1980s show the extent to which the Pakistani govern-
ment and the ISI were very, very happy to take America’s money and
act for their own benefit. So it is not only about superpowers but
about what nations are willing to do to other nations in the name of
freedom and justice. (Kramatschek n.p.)
In Burnt Shadows, while talking to Steve, Harry similarly comments on

the alliance between national and global politics that contributes to an
international fear of Muslims and stereotyping of the Muslim world:
In Harry’s mind, there was a map of the world with countries appear-
ing as mere outlines, waiting to be shaded in with stripes of red,
white and blue as they were drawn into the strictly territorial battle
of the Afghans versus the Soviets in which no one else claimed a
part. When he arrived in Islamabad, it had been a three way affair:
Egypt provided the Soviet-made arms, America provided financing,
training and technological assistance, and Pakistan provided the base
for training camps. But now, the war was truly international. (203)
Harry’s comments are significant with reference to Appadurai’s obser-

vations: national politics and global alliances prepare the grounds for
international wars and, specifically in this context, “attacks against

ordinary Muslims” that perpetuate the fallacy “that they truly belong
not to a terrorized minority but to a terrifying majority, the Muslim
world itself” (Fear 111). Shamsie avows that “the British and American
empires, through their conscienceless colonialism (and particularly
America’s use of the bomb) are responsible for the very troubled world
we live in today” (See 1–2). Nevertheless, she is equally critical of
Pakistan’s support of the Afghan jihad, which has made Pakistan vul-
nerable to Islamic extremism and was mainly responsible for the influx
of weapons into Karachi and North Peshawar. Shamsie’s stance on Zia’s
Islamisation policy and on his support of the Afghan jihad justifies her
own position as a representative of Pakistan; it clearly rebuts Bruce
King’s critique of writers of Pakistani origin, when he queries:
why none of these writers finds room to show the rise of fundamen-
talism, its causes, and how it influences national and international
politics. It is almost as if there were an inability to look directly at
the problems caused when Islam becomes political; instead there is
the recycling of clichéd criticisms of the United States, colonialism
and capitalism. (687)
Shamsie is not merely critical of US imperialistic ventures in the Muslim

world. Her novels quite explicitly foreground local and regional con-
flicts as well as the repercussions of Zia’s national and foreign policies.
This is where Shamsie’s perspective expands to include the complexities
of identity and nationality at a global level.
As mentioned earlier, the yearning and nostalgia with which Shamsie’s
diasporic characters regard their places of origin has serious implications
in the current climate of Islamophobia. The 9/11 events have sundered
the world into discordant cultural spaces, a neo-Orientalist binary of
“Us” and “Them”. At this historical juncture, Shamsie’s protagonist Ed
(Broken Verses) “stopped being an individual and started being an entire
religion” (45). This is particularly evident from the representation of
Muslims in the US in the novel. Through the character of Ed, Shamsie
challenges myths about the US as a global cosmopolitan space. Ed – who
happily embraces the American dream and faces no significant prob-
lems in being part of mainstream pre-9/11 American society – becomes
a victim of “war on terror” after 9/11. Thus he returns to Pakistan after
spending ten years in New York. Similarly he is no longer entitled to pur-
sue his dreams in the UK, another foreign land: “I mean I wanted to go
to London and join RADA. That was it. The only dream I could think of.
But everyone convinced me, places like that they don’t even consider
Pakistanis” (61). Despite Ed’s insistence that it was not something spe-
cific “that made him decide to leave” America, a foreign land, his final
comment sums up this post-9/11 dilemma: “I was laid off because I’m
Muslim” (46). And it is, indeed, because of his Muslim and Pakistani
identity that he is listed among likely suspects who may be interrogated
by “[t]he INS. Guantanamo Bay. The unrandom random security checks
in airports. The visit from the FBI” (46). In Burnt Shadows, Hiroko, by
contrast, possesses a certain ontological priority as a Japanese national,
which is denied to Ed as a Pakistani national.
Hiroko Tanaka, a survivor of the 1940s Nagasaki bombing, travels
to India to find Elizabeth, the half-sister of her dead German fiancé
Konrad, and Elizabeth’s English husband, James Burton. During her stay
with them, she falls in love with their Muslim employee, Sajjad Ashraf,
whom she marries. Following the 1947 Partition, Sajjad and Hiroko are
forced to settle in Pakistan where they raise their son, Raza. Troubled by
his mixed Japanese-Pakistani heritage and “Hazara” looks, Raza makes
friends with Afghan refugees. Later, Raza’s life becomes entangled with
that of Elizabeth and James Burton’s son, Harry, whose job is to help
the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As a result of his
association with Harry, Raza begins to work as a mercenary for a private
security firm. After Sajjad’s death, Hiroko heads to the US – a land she
abhors after its military destroyed her city and her fiancé – to live with
Elizabeth and with Harry’s daughter Kim. On Hiroko’s arrival at New
York airport, the immigration officer “looked quizzically from her face
to her Pakistani passport, then heaved a great sigh as he opened the
passport and saw her place of birth scrawled beneath her husband’s
name. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, stamping her passport without asking a single
question. ‘You’ll be safe here”’ (287). Unlike Ed, who as a Pakistani, is
forced to leave the US, Hiroko finds no significant problem in making
the US her new home. Moreover, Hiroko’s Japanese nationality qualifies
her to be a recipient of benefits such as social security that are denied to
Ed as a Pakistani. More or less the same prejudice is highlighted in the
novel when Harry’s colleague Steve cautions him not to recruit Muslims
for his projects:
You’re an idiot to hire all these Third Country Nationals. Economi-

cally, sure, I see the sense. But stop recruiting them from Pakistan
and Bangladesh. You’re acting like this is a territorial war and they’re
neutral parties. Go with guys from Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Philippines.
Indians are OK, so long as they’re not Muslim. (280)
Such suspicions about Muslims in the post-9/11 world have not only
triggered hostile feelings towards Islam and Muslims but have serious
implications for Muslims in the West such as racial profiling and dis-
criminatory attitudes at airports, workplaces and even in public spaces.
Shamsie highlights this through the character of Ed and Abdullah in
Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows respectively.
With reference to the current discourses of Islamophobia narratives
that have affected Muslim identities, Judith Butler illustrates how the
cry that “‘there is no excuse for September 11’ has become a means by
which to stifle any serious public discussions of how US foreign policy
has helped to create a world in which such acts of terror are possible”
(Precarious 3). What Butler suggests is that the rhetoric of the US “war on
terror” has suspended our capacity to think about causes behind current
global conflicts through its strategy of a deliberate conflation of acts of
war and acts of terror. Butler contends that discursive strategies that
synonymise Muslimness with terrorism and the deliberate conflation of
acts of terror and acts of self-defence in the wake of 9/11 events inevita-
bly resulted in the discursive creation of a feared ‘other’. This was done
to create an impression that people are living in “a state of ontological
hysteria” ( Jackson 118).
Following Butler’s lead, I argue that Shamsie flags up this state of
ontological hysteria in Burnt Shadows. The events in the final section
of the novel, which is set in Afghanistan and New York, are framed
in such a way that through an interaction between foreigners and
nationals (of the US) Shamsie builds a tale of tension and complexity,
guilt and anger. For example, Kim’s perception of the Muslim world
reflects a post-9/11 fear of Muslims in the US. Her paranoia about
Abdullah and her act of informing the police about him reflect the
consequences of international discourse on the “war on terror” trum-
peted by George Bush. It is in this context that Abdullah is perceived
as a terrorist and a threat by Kim. Moreover, when Raza comes to help
Abdullah, he is arrested by the US police and the “policemen need
never know [that Raza] had helped Abdullah escape; they’d merely
conclude that the American woman was paranoid, seeing a threat in
every Muslim” (359). Reflecting on the same paranoia about Muslims
in the language of the international media and widely circulated
visual images, Susheila Nasta elaborates: “We all – whether insiders or
outsiders – seem to be culpable participants but are, at the same time,
rendered helpless as the plethora of images of this so-called ‘war on
terror’ accumulates, amplifies and continues to induce more panic and
fear” (“Cultures of Terror” 1–3).
The above analysis suggests that “war on terror” propaganda has

resulted in the stigmatisation of Muslims, who are fixed into a single
homogenous category that resonates with the image of “Islamic Rage
Boy” (Morey and Yaqin 26–28). Morey and Yaqin’s recent book on
the issue of stereotyping Muslims after 9/11 provides an interesting
insight into the processes by which certain images are constructed
that when used again and again become “default signifier[s]” and “fetish
object[s]” (Morey and Yaqin 19–25). In Burnt Shadows, Ilse’s grave mis-
conception of Sajjad as a rapist, and Kim’s suspicion about Abdullah as a
terrorist, provide corroborating evidence for the influence of the image
of Islamic Rage Boy, which also resonates with what Bhabha describes
as ideological construction of otherness based on “the idea of fixity”
(Location 66). Raza’s request that Kim help Abdullah leave America also
reflects a stereotypical construction of Muslims in the US: “He’s an
Afghan who ran from the FBI. These days that’s the kind of thing your
paranoid nation thinks is evidence of terrorism” (299). This kind of
stigmatisation of Muslims at an international level has become a cliché
and denies the complexities of identity or any chance of change. Butler
argues that former president George W. Bush proposed a kind of bina-
rism in which only two positions are possible: “Either you’re with us or
you’re with the terrorists”. As a result of this, it is almost impossible to
“hold a position in which one opposes both and queries the terms in
which the opposition is framed” because “to oppose the war mean[s] to
some that one somehow felt sympathy with terrorism, or that one saw
the terror as justified” (Butler, Precarious 2). In the novel, it is this feel-
ing of sympathy with Abdullah, a fellow Muslim (and fetish object for
the US Army), which ultimately sends Raza to Guantanamo Bay; this
happens despite all of Raza’s services for a private security firm that is
working for Harry Burton, a covert CIA operative in Pakistan.
Against the backdrop of the homogenised categorisation of Muslims
in which all Muslims are imagined as a monolithic community, per-
formative aspects of faith have emerged as major signifiers of reframed
Muslim identities in the post-9/11 world. Religious dress and practices
serve as important affirmative identity markers. This increasing religious
performativity, which is defined by Gilroy as religiosity, has blurred
the public and private dimensions of individuals’ faith. Accentuating
religion qua performance, as well as delimiting the private and public
spheres, Burnt Shadows demonstrates how Raza’s Muslim identity is
emphasised by Steve through the recognition and sanctioning of his
private life. Despite the fact that he is working for a security firm that
has links with the CIA, Raza’s Muslim identity – which becomes evident
to Steve through the performance of a religious act – makes Steve con-

template Raza’s skills of deception. Steve becomes suspicious about
Raza precisely at the moment when he sees him offering his prayers.
Steve’s perception of Raza’s religious practice fixes Raza’s identity as a
Muslim. In a cave in Afghanistan, Steve discusses Raza’s religiosity with
Harry and is taken aback by the latter’s apparently relaxed response: “It
really doesn’t bother you – in this time, in this place – that he’s found
religion?” In response to Harry’s bafflement Steve adds, “I saw him pros-
trating himself in front of a mosque the first time I flew in. He thought
there was no one around to see him” (281). Steve translates Raza’s
apparently private act of prayer into a public assertion of faith. This has
serious implications for Raza, as a Muslim, in terms of his public role in
a security firm linked to the CIA, which is shown in the novel to be on
a mission against Islamic extremists in the wake of 9/11.
Butler’s concept of gender performativity is significant in understand-
ing how Raza’s “body comes to bear cultural meaning” (“Performative
Acts” 519–531). Emphasising the performativity of gender attributes on
the basis of which a body produces its “cultural signification”, Butler
argues that “these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are
said to express or reveal”. What Butler suggests is that gender is not
based on internal identity but on the reflective aspects of performativ-
ity: “one is compelled to live in a world in which genders constitute
univocal signifiers, in which gender is stabilized, polarized, rendered
discrete and intractable” (“Performative Acts” 528). A juxtaposition of
Butler’s theory of gender performativity with the performative aspects
of religion indicates that whatever he actually believes (or thinks) about
his security job, Raza’s performativity of faith is seen by Steve as a
(religious) attribute that primarily constitutes his identity as a Muslim,
rather than as a Pakistani-American national supporting the US in the
fight against terrorism. According to this postulation, Raza is judged
by Steve within a specific frame of reference and societal perception.
His act of offering prayer does not reflect a merely individual and pri-
vate act, but a public and performative act that is viewed by Steve as
a signifier of Raza’s Muslim identity; therefore there is no difference
between Raza and other Afghan mujahideen. Moreover, Raza’s body,
while offering prayers, comes to bear cultural meaning which, in the
post-9/11 context, delimits his identity options or subject position,
reaffirming a neo-Orientalist stereotype that “Asiatics [are] duplicitous”
(Bhabha, Location 75). As Steve says to Harry about Raza: “You know
his skills at deception. Come on Harry”. Realising Harry’s casual atti-
tude towards Raza’s religiosity, Steve emphasises the way that Raza, as
a seventeen-year-old boy, had joined the mujahideen’s camp by show-

ing his identity as Raza Hazara: “And even now, no one except [them]
knows … Surrounded by Paks and no one knows he’s one of them”
(281). Throughout the episode, Shamsie suggests an interesting over-
lap between performance and deception. Raza’s religious performance,
which represents an authentic devotion to his faith, is misunderstood
by Steve as duplicitous performance.
A misunderstanding between Kim and Abdullah during their conver-
sation about Islam is informed by a similar kind of conflationary rheto-
ric of devotion-deception (i.e. adherence to faith, which is a symbol of
authentic devotion for the practitioner, is perceived as duplicitous per-
formance for the onlooker). Abdullah’s devotion to Islam is perceived
by Kim as a symbol of his religious extremism. Kim’s understanding of
Abdullah’s devotion to Islam resonates with what Shamsie describes as
“the most damaging form of interpretation” of Islam. With regards to
the interpretation of Islam and Islamic tradition, Shamsie argues that
the “only thing that is baffling is expert commentators from outside the
Muslim world” who tend to quote the Qur’an and Hadith without proper
contextualisation. In so doing, they explain:
Muslim reactions to offence rather than recognizing the plurality of

interpretation within the Islamic tradition and asking, more perti-
nently: why, at a precise collision of history and geography, should
certain forms of interpretations be privileged over others … And why
do the most damaging forms of interpretation currently co-exist at
so many points of geographic and historic collision? (Offence 10–11)
Here Shamsie flags up a homogenising tendency within the West when

referring to Islam or framing Muslims. As such, the plurality of interpre-
tations within Islamic tradition remains unacknowledged. This is pre-
cisely what happens during Kim and Abdullah’s discussion about Islam.
Abdullah’s effort to clarify his position as an Afghan in the US offends
an American woman and she starts arguing with him about whether
he really understands the Qur’an and Islam. Kim asks Abdullah: “[i]f
an Afghan dies in the act of killing infidels in his country does he go
straight to heaven?” Abdullah replies: “If people he kills come as invad-
ers or occupiers, yes. He is shaheed. Martyr” (346). Abdullah’s personal
interpretation of the Qur’an is taken by Kim as an ideology propagated
by terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda. Her anger and paranoia about
Abdullah compel the ascription of what Salman Sayyid and Abdool
Karim Vakil call a “homogenising and totalising label which privileges
one identity option or subject position over other” (15). Kim considers
Abdullah as one of those “Afghan[s] with a gun who never stopped
to think of Harry Burton as anything but an infidel invader whose
death opened up a path to Paradise” (347). Her final decision to brand
Abdullah as a terrorist is also based on the most damaging interpreta-
tions about jihad that currently exist due to al-Qaeda’s notoriety. The
most striking thing is that everyone claims to know Islam better than
a Muslim does, an attitude that drives Abdullah mad as he says: “They
are all, everyone, everywhere you go now … everyone just wants to tell
you what they know about Islam, how they know so much more than
you do” (352).
In response to rising Islamophobia after 9/11, Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows
can be read as an effort to deconstruct the East–West binary in diasporic
contexts. Stigmatisation on the basis of ethnicity has morphed into stig-
matisation on the basis of faith, and xenophobia has taken the form of
Islamophobia. In the novel, Shamsie challenges ongoing debates regard-
ing the integration of Muslim diaspora communities in Western socie-
ties through the forced migrations of her characters. In contrast to Raza,
who is not happy with his hyphenated identity, Hiroko learns to live
in a multilingual and multicultural world. Similarly Rehana, a Pakistani
woman born in Abbottabad, is at home in strangeness: “Karachi might
be part of the same country as her childhood home but it was still as for-
eign to her as Tokyo, but I’m at home in the idea of foreignness” (141).
Hiroko shows no interest in “belonging to anything as contradictorily
insubstantial and damaging as a nation” (204). Ed, Aliya and Karim all
try to retain their feelings for home even in states of alienation, but
in Burnt Shadows, characters learn to extend their bodies in diasporic
spaces of otherness.8 Through this positive extension of self in spaces
of otherness, Hiroko, Sajjad, Ilse and Raza want to overcome a sense of
unbelonging. Shamsie emphasises this in Burnt Shadows at the level of
narrative; all the sections have two families, one from “the East” and
one from “the West”. There are situations when it becomes impossible
for the characters to feel that they are living outside history, despite
their efforts. Yet through their interaction and situations in “which
heterogeneous cultures are yoked by violence”, Shamsie “offers nuances
of trauma that cannot be neatly partitioned between colonizer and
colonized”. Shamsie’s novel is significant in identifying both “subject
positions as victims of traumatic change” (Suleri, Rhetoric 5). This break-
down of binary thinking is highlighted in Burnt Shadows where white
Britons, as well as Asians, become victims of traumatic change. It is not
only Hiroko’s, Sajjad’s and Raza’s lives that are irrevocably marred by
the US bombing of Nagasaki, and by the partition of India and Pakistan;

Harry’s, Ilse’s and Kim’s lives are also affected.
Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows can be read as an effort to abolish “all the dis-
tinctions between centre and periphery, and other ‘binarisms’ that are
allegedly a legacy of colonial(ist) ways of thinking [in order] to reveal
societies globally in their complex heterogeneity and contingency”
(Dirlik 52). Sajjad’s compatibility with Hiroko despite their affiliation to
different religions and communities, Raza’s friendship with Harry, Kim’s
friendship with Raza, and Ilse’s affiliation with Hiroko reveal the contin-
gency and heterogeneity of global societies in which the whole concept
of otherness crumbles; it is not only South Asians who are shown to
be displaced. Neat divisions of margin and centre are blurred in such
a way that both are revealed as steeped in constructions of otherness.
Though on the one hand Islamophobia has posed a problematic debate
in Western public and academic discourses, on the other hand, accord-
ing to Shamsie, “[a]nti-Americanism was, and continues to be a rich
vein to be mined in the Pakistani psyche” (Offence 66). By complicating
such reductive binaries, Shamsie suggests:
The only way out of this vicious circle of mutual suspicion is for both
sides to take a closer look at each other. A closer look at the Muslims of
the world reveals many different pieces in the Mosaic of the Offended
Muslim. An even closer look reveals that the Mosaic of the Offended
Muslim is only a small part of the larger Mosaic of Muslims. (Offence 77)
It is in this context that Gilroy critiques a neoliberal dialectic of “Civilisa-

tionalism” that shamelessly demarcates “us” and “them”, perpetuating a
global politics of racism and “colour feeling” against immigrants (108).
A similar interaction between East and West and a critique of neoliberal
dialectic of ‘Civilisationalism’, albeit in pre-9/11 contexts, is highlighted
in Shamsie’s recent novel A God in Every Stone (2014). Here, as in her pre-
vious novel Burnt Shadows, Shamsie is interested in the broad sweep of
history: of ancient Persia between 485 and 515 BCE and the dissolution of
the Ottoman state; the First World War and the decline of British rule in
the then-Indian city of Peshawar in the1930s. This broad sweep of history
is united with the recurring theme of archaeology. In the novel, Shamsie
pictures the whole region of Peshawar on the brink of political change;
the British Empire’s brutal suppression of unarmed demonstrators, the
1930 massacres in the Street of Storytellers and the non-violent struggle
of Pashtun independence activists are all portrayed vividly as factors con-
tributing to the expulsion of the British from the Indian subcontinent.
Using love and archaeology as the main driving forces of the plot,
Shamsie’s story features an Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer, who
accompanies a Turkish archaeologist called Tahsin Bey on a dig in
Labraunda. Tahsin, her father’s friend, is the man who fostered Viv’s
interest in archaeology through the stories he used to tell her in child-
hood about an ancient Greek explorer, Scylax, and his betrayal of the
Persian king, Darius. Sent by the emperor, Scylax started his journey
from Caspatyrus (now Peshawar) and followed the course of the Indus
to the Red Sea, which he explored before sailing back to Persia. Darius
gave a silver circlet to Scylax as a token of great honour. However,
when his people rebelled against the Persians, Scylax supported his
countrymen and the circlet was lost. Rediscovery of the mythical circlet
of Scylax becomes Tahsin’s passion in the novel. Viv shares Tahsin’s
passion, and during the digs their friendship blossoms into a love that
is tragically curtailed by the outbreak of the First World War. Upon
her return from Turkey to Britain, Viv chooses to volunteer as a nurse.
Meanwhile, Tahsin sends Viv and her family a Christmas card, in which
he mentions that he longs to rush to Peshawar to see “the Sacred Casket
of Kanishka” (38). Believing that even in the midst of the war Tahsin
intends to remind her of her passion for archaeology, Viv persuades her
family to allow her to travel to Peshawar.
During her stay in Peshawar, Viv strongly feels for Tahsin and writes
letters to him, but she never hears back from him. It is only when she
returns to London that she hears of Tahsin’s fate from his nephew,
Mehmet, who tells her that “He [Tahsin] was dead because of her
[betrayal]” (167). It is at this stage that an Englishwoman faces the most
embarrassing and guilty moment of her life: no matter where “she went
in the world, whatever she did, this would always be the truth at the
core of her life” that she betrayed a man from the East! (167). Before
leaving for Peshawar, a gentleman from the War Office had visited Viv
to get copies of the maps of the Turkish coastline – “one of the most
militarily significant stretches of land in the world” – which she had
drawn during her last dig with Tahsin. The officer had emphasised
the significance of her drawings to the “Maps Division”. Thus, as an
Englishwoman overwhelmed with the idea of being “of singular value
to Empire”, she had been convinced by what the officer had said: “You
can’t betray a man to his friends, only to his enemies, the man from the
War Office said. What you say will do no harm, and it may do our boys
at the Front a great deal of good. I can’t put it more simply or honestly
than that” (31, 35). Imagining what her father would consider appro-
priate at a time of war, Viv found herself in a position where she could
please her father, who had always regretted not having a son whom he
could sent to war. But, by giving Tahsin’s information to the gentleman
from the War Office and thereby disclosing the “deepest secret” (166)
of his loyalties with “the people [he] loved first, love most deeply”
(25), “she had done as much as any man’s son on the battlefield” and
had made her father proud (35). Tahsin’s dual Turkish and Armenian
identity, which he reveals only to Viv, makes him indispensable in the
historical holy war between the British and Ottoman Empires; once
identified as a possible “Armenian sympathizer” and “a useful inform-
ant” by British archaeologist Wilhelm, the Germans “relayed the infor-
mation to the Ottomans” and two days after the receipt of the telegram
“Tahsin was shot dead” (166).
As I argued earlier, A God in Every Stone interrogates the “clash of
civilisations” thesis like Shamsie’s other novels, albeit in a pre-9/11
context. This thesis is most fully articulated in Samuel P. Huntington’s
The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, in which he
contends that the:
underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism.

It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of
the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferior-
ity of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S.
Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose
people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe
that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obliga-
tion to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic
ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West. (217–218)
When analysed in the light of Huntington’s assertion, the conflict

between the British and Ottoman Empires vividly illustrates such “clash
of civilisations” rhetoric and the idea of clashing West and Islamic world
models that is nothing more than a tedious repetition of the same neo-
Orientalist discourses. However, it is precisely this thesis that Shamsie
attempts to challenge in the novel. She rejects the phrase “clash of
civilisations”, which, according to her, “implies something inevitable or
essential about enmity between people from different places, different
religions” (Filgate n.p.). She aims instead for an anti-essentialist way of
thinking through the subject of Muslim civilisation. In so doing, she
steps back in time to 1930s Peshawar with the aim not only of high-
lighting its rich history and widely ignored museum of Gandhara art,
but also to emphasise the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar (the Servant
of God) movement against the British Raj. This image of Peshawar and
Pashtuns stands in marked contrast to representations of present-day
Peshawar, a region that has been at the forefront of the US “war on ter-
ror” with all the violence and religious extremism prevalent there and
for allegedly becoming “the escape hatch for al-Qaeda and the Taliban”
(Rashid 268). It is this skewed perception of the region that Shamsie
intends to subvert; as we see in relation to the characters of Qayyum
and Khan Ghaffar, the unrepresentability of “the non-violent Pashtun
rather than the one who picks up a gun” becomes Shamsie’s main
concern. She says in an interview that her interest in the (albeit brief)
representation of the character of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, based on a
real-life figure, and his non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar political move-
ment is intended to show how “that goes so against the grain of all ste-
reotypes about Pashtuns and their guns” (Friday Times, n.p.). Shamsie
reinforces this aspect in an episode when Kalaam urges Qayyum to join
the “peaceful jihad” against the British Empire that asks them to fight
against their Muslim brothers.
Qayyum, a Pashtun soldier, returns from Europe to his native home-
land after losing an eye at Ypres. Qayyum has served as Lance-Naik with
the 40th Pathans on the Western Front and has witnessed the unspeak-
able horrors of the war. On his return to Peshawar, Qayyum join hands
with Ghaffar Khan’s non-violent independence activists (known as Red
Shirts) against the British Raj, having been disillusioned by the war and
the treatment of Indian soldiers by the Empire, as well as intending to
repay his loyal sepoy Kalaam, to whom he remains indebted for shield-
ing him. While convincing Qayyum to join the Red Shirts movement,
Kalaam contends: “Don’t look indignant, Lance-Naik – you should be
proud to belong to a people who won’t kill their brothers at the com-
mand of their oppressors” (116). Here, Shamsie alludes to the 1930
Civil Disobedience movement, the quintessence of the denunciation
of fanaticism and violence that Shamsie seeks to espouse in her novel.
As a contrast to the array of brutalities employed by the British Empire
and its devastating use of arms and weapons, the Pathans responded
with forbearance and patience. Emphasising this non-violent resistance
of Pathans, John Cheeran also corroborates that Shamsie “excavates
memories of a terrible massacre on April 23, 1930 in the Storyteller’s
Street in Peshawar and brings alive Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the
Frontier Gandhi, who urged Pashtuns in NWFP to break their addiction
to violence and revenge and hold on to righteousness and patience,
instead of embarking on jihad” (n.p.). The historiography of Pashtuns
testifies to the fact that for decades they have lived peacefully and
denounced terrorism and violence imposed on them from European

invaders in an attempt to stamp out their Pashtun identity (Lieven 401,
432; Siddique 132, 218). Since the last two decades have been particu-
larly preoccupied with the notion of jihad and violence, this gesture of
highlighting specific traits of a particular nation, in this case the non-
violent trait of Pathans, is certainly an important representationalist
feature of Shamsie’s post-9/11 novels, serving to dispel neo-orientalist
thoughts about Muslims and the notion of jihad. Shamsie describes
being fascinated when she researched Khan Ghaffar, popularly known
as Bacha Khan:
in KP (the former NWFP) Khan is still widely revered – the most vis-
ible reminder of that was when Malala referred to him as one of her
heroes while addressing the UN. In other parts of Pakistan, though,
he’s largely absent from the collective imagination. But of course he’s
very relevant as a heroic figure who stood for non-violence, education
for both men and women, and a resistance to damaging ideologies.
(Friday Times, n.p.)
It is important to consider that both Qayyum and Najeeb seem to

have been framed by Shamsie with a view to dispelling the legitimacy
of neo-Orientalist thoughts. For example, Peshawar’s enchanting multi-
layered history is explored in the novel by Najeeb with the help of
Viv, “the prototype of the benevolent Orientalist” (Ghoshal n.p.). In
so doing, Shamsie’s novel can be read as a powerful critique of the dis-
courses surrounding East–West/orient–occident binarism, as well as of
the familiar trope of the ‘civilising mission of the Empire’ – the white
man’s burden. This is demonstrated in the novel through a conversa-
tion between Viv and Remmick, “the political agent” of the Empire (83).
Remmick, considering Viv and himself as carriers of the “universal” civi-
lisation reminds her of the “mission” that they have come to achieve
in Peshawar, “some of us in large ways, and some of us in small” (144).
Most significantly, the idea of a “civilising mission” is focalised through
the figure of Najeeb, whom Viv meets in Peshawar and nicknames
“the Herodotus of Peshawar”. Najeeb dreams of becoming a national
assistant in the local museum, so when he comes into contact with Viv
he starts taking lessons from her about the history of the region, past
excavations and travellers in antiquity. Keen to accompany Viv more
regularly on her digs, he persuades her to return to Peshawar to help
him find Scylax’s silver circlet in the second half of the novel when
he becomes an archaeologist and later a campaigner for freedom from
the British Empire. This defines Najeeb’s subject position as a native

informant. His job title, “‘Indian Assistant’ (the role formerly known as
‘Native Assistant’)”, also seems to echo the familiar trope of the “native
informant”. Although the term “native informant” appears in Edward
Said’s Orientalism, my use of the term in Najeeb’s context is informed
by Trinh T. Minh-ha, who frames the figure of the native informant as
someone who is “handicapped”, “cannot represent [him/herself] and
has to learn how to represent [him/herself]” (59). Najeeb, in a letter to
his brother Qayyum, convinces him that he is “grateful to the English
for putting this spade in [his] hands and allowing [him] to know [his]
own history” (181–182). Unable to dig the treasures of his own land and
study his own history “without imagination, as Herodotus teaches us”
and without being taught by Viv, a senior lecturer from the University
of London, Najeeb does not proceed with the excavation, which vividly
illustrates his status as a native informant. Qayyum, on the other hand,
who has once served as a loyal soldier of the British Empire, criticises
the views purported by Najeeb in his letter and responds to this so-
called benevolent mission with cynicism:
Of all the fantastic tales you’ve ever told none is more fantastic
than that of the kindly English who dig up our treasures because
they want you to know your own history. Your museums are all part
of their Civilising Mission, their White Man’s Burden, their moral
justification for what they have done here. As for the spade they
place in your hand. The honours they shower on you – the English
are too few, we too many and so they see that it is necessary for there
to be a class of Indian who will revere then, feel honoured by them,
benefit from their presence and, ultimately serve them because if our
numbers turn against them to say “Leave” there is no way for them
to stay. (185)
Robust enough to take on such a role, despite his elder brother’s advice
to keep the Englishwoman away from his plans, Najeeb decides to
proceed with excavation permission to go on digs with Viv (189).
Of course, the whole discussion leads us to a significant narrative
device of the novel: the drastic inversion of conventional patterns of
oriental and occidental behaviour, which Shamsie uses as her main
strategy in the novel, subverting the whole notion of the “civilising
mission of the empire”; violence, savagery, barbarism and lack of under-
standing that characterise “the orient” in colonial discourses have in
fact been associated in the novel with the British Empire. It is the British
Army that brutally tries to suppress unarmed demonstrators during the

1930 massacres in the Street of Storytellers, while Khudai Khidmatgar
activists remain peaceful. Similarly, neither Najeeb nor Qayyum show
any antagonism towards the British. Najeeb, even in the midst of the
massacres in the Street of Storytellers, is shown to be obsessed with
Peshawar’s ancient history and his excavation adventures with Viv:
during the protest strike, he shows agitation over missing a “chance to
bring Miss Spencer from the train station to the Street of Storytellers
where ‘Darius and the Betrayal of Scylax’ is now a familiar and well-
loved tale” (273). Likewise, in his commitment to the struggle for inde-
pendence, Qayyum’s allegiances with the British Army and later with
Khudai Khidmatgars have been “shaped by human rather than patriotic
values” (Ghoshal n.p.). Only after having witnessed British atrocities in
India does Qayyum opt to fight with the unarmed Khudai Khidmatgars
of Ghaffar Khan for the expulsion of the British Army that he had
previously defended at great personal cost. He writes clearly to Najeeb:
I bear no hatred for the English. It is our weakness that is responsible

for the state we are in. How dishonoured a people we were to allow
the men of small island who burn at the touch of the sun to come
here and be our masters. And when the English leave, as they must,
I will welcome them back into our house as visitors and show them
all the courtesy and hospitality of the Pushtuns. (185)
It is Viv, however, who cannot escape her customary affiliation to the

Empire; in one of the episodes when she wears a burqa in order to hide
her identity and so move safely through Peshawar, she imagines herself
“half-woman, half-tent”. Viv’s reaction to women in burqa is significant:
The rage she felt on behalf of the women of the Peshawar Valley as
she sweltered beneath the voluminous burqa dispelled any ambiva-
lence she might have started to feel about Indian demands for self-
rule. All these Indians talking about political change when really
what this country desperately needed was social change. Why should
they be allowed independence when they only wanted it for half the
population? (218)
Viv, being an Englishwoman, without an understanding of the meaning

of social practices from the inside, cannot help but conflate Pashtun
purdah culture, of which the majority of Muslim women are proud,
with patriarchal conservatism. Without liberating the contested topic
of veiling form its religious context, it is not possible to understand the

meaning of this cultural and ethnic practice. As Rasmussen argues: “We
still need to remind ourselves, however, that women in some parts of
the world choose to veil, and they are often educated and economically
independent, or about to embark on professions” (255). Most of the
Pathan women also choose to veil, as do a significant number of women
in the subcontinent and Afghanistan.
In her fiction, Shamsie highlights this paranoia in a range of con-
texts beyond Britain and demonstrates its wide-ranging ontological
and epistemological effects. Gilroy has famously argued that the West
must “transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that
would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that
is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers
or otherness” (108). What Gilroy suggests for the West is indubitably
relevant to Shamsie’s critique of Pakistan’s internal problems and ethno-
centrism against the backdrop of Zia’s political manipulation of Islam.
Nevertheless, Shamsie suggests that as religion has emerged as a major
social signifier since 9/11, Muslims in the diaspora cannot be gener-
alised as one homogenous group because of differences in the public
performativity of radical, secular and moderate Muslims. Two charac-
ters in Burnt Shadows, Raza and Abdullah, are the quintessence of her
nuanced engagements with this theme. This is why the term “Muslim”
has emerged in recent years as more diverse and encompassing than the
term “Islamist”, as I will discuss in detail in the next chapter. Shamsie’s
Burnt Shadows can be taken as an appeal to what is described by Gilroy as
“planetary humanism”, denoting the ability to accept cultural diversity
and pluralism. Gilroy’s idea of planetary humanism tacitly reinforces
the notion of Muslim ummah, which is based on postnational identity
and accommodates and embraces humanity, because of the diversity
it carries within itself. Disrupting essentialist ideas about places and
cultures, Shamsie challenges articulations of a new orthodoxy towards
Islam and Muslims in hegemonic international discourses, and compli-
cates the purported “clash of civilisations” by showing her characters as
transcending national boundaries and crossing cultural borders.
4
Global Ummah: Negotiating
Transnational Muslim Identities
Post-9/11 culture plays a significant role in redefining diasporic Muslim

identities due to an inability or unwillingness of some diasporics to be
fully accepted among host or home communities. This situation fos-
ters feelings of alienation, exclusion, trauma and melancholy in such
diasporics and deprives them of any sense of belonging. As a result of
these pathologies of dislocation, diasporic identities are increasingly
constructed on the basis of an imagined space that is not only geo-
graphically diverse, but also free from cultural artefacts of indigenous-
ness. Since 9/11, Western public discourses have been raising questions
over potential links between radical Islam, terrorism and Muslims,
particularly because the terrorists who were involved in attacks on
the World Trade Centre and the 7/7 London bombings were Western-
educated Muslims. In this chapter I argue that it is largely due to the
nature of emerging public narratives about the “war on terror” that
second-generation diasporics in Britain – alienated from their cultures
of origin and yet proud of their Muslim identities – are renegotiating
their identities by affiliating with a global ummah.
Examining a spectrum of generations of migrants, Aslam’s novels
highlight reasons for the emergence of a postnational identity by
deconstructing the cultural stereotypes and clichés inherent in Western
Orientalist discourses, as well as by showing how hyphenated selves
also suffer the scourge of communal tensions. In this attempt to move
beyond the politics of race, Aslam’s fictional world deals with other-
ness and cultural differences with a view to highlighting the crises of
inter- and intra-cultural communication. While Khan and Shamsie
primarily regard sectarianism, ethnicity, ancestral affiliations and the
Islamic extremism that was rampant during Zia’s reign as precursors to
contemporary intra-cultural conflicts within the subcontinent, religious
157
affiliation mainly serves as the basis for the inter- and intra-cultural
conflicts in diasporic contexts in Aslam’s novels. Accentuating the reli-
gious fervour of some of his characters, Aslam dramatises the potential
clash between East and West as well as between secular and Islamic
approaches with regard to first-generation and second-generation immi-
grants. This clash, I argue, perpetuates the fallacy “that they [Muslims]
truly belong not to a terrorized minority but to a terrifying majority, the
Muslim world itself” (Appadurai, Fear 111). Aslam’s novels – Maps for
Lost Lovers (2004), The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden
(2013) – mark this paradigmatic shift from an Orientalist epistemology
to a terrorist ontology.
Given the problem of diasporic identity formation in the light of
this post-9/11 paradigm shift, Aslam’s focus has also shifted from
the transnational to the post-national. Even in novels that are set
mainly in Pakistan, such as The Blind Man’s Garden, characters tend
to distance themselves from reductive nationalisms; hence, the focus
remains on the postnational rather than nationalism. Similarly, the
double displacement of Aslam’s subjects – who do not find recogni-
tion either in national or in diasporic space – encourages his diaspor-
ics to reframe their identities by liberating them from hyphenated
identities based on ethnicity (British-Asian) or even ethno-religiosity
(British-Muslims).
Immigrants as strangers
This section primarily focuses on intra-cultural communal tensions,

proffering the figure of a “familiar stranger”. Given this context, I argue
that the (white) British community is absent from Maps for Lost Lovers
in order to foreground the Pakistani communities in Britain. The grow-
ing ambivalence of migrant ontology due to border crossing has turned
migrants into strangers in their adopted host land, as well as homeland.
The physical distance of immigrants from their place of birth or origin
makes them outsiders within their own homeland. Similarly, the place
they actually occupy is not the place they have originated from or
the one they can call their “real” home. Looking at it another way, an
immigrant is viewed as a stranger who is not quite “us” or “them” in at
least two places, as “one who is excluded from forms of belonging and
identity, particularly within the context of discourses of nationhood”
(Ahmed, Strange Encounters 5). Given this problematic, and a related
complexity of the existence of multiple “others”, diasporic identi-
ties necessarily attempt to occupy an ambivalent third space which,
Global Ummah 159
paradoxically, allows them to reconstruct their identities in a more

“authentic” way, as I will discuss.
In Maps for Lost Lovers, Aslam’s second novel, Kaukab finds this kind
of “strangerness” within her children in Dasht-e-Tanhai (an unspeci-
fied fictional town in the north of England with a name meaning
“Desert of Loneliness”). Maps for Lost Lovers is the story of a British-
Pakistani community at the crossroads of liberalism and orthodoxy.
At the heart of the novel, Chanda and Jugnu have gone missing upon
return from Pakistan. The police suspect that this is a case of honour
killing and arrest Chanda’s brothers. In the midst of this gloom, we
encounter Kaukab, her husband Shamas, and their three estranged and
Westernised children – Mah-Jabin, Ujala and Charag – as they await the
killer’s trial. Torn between her religious orthodoxy and her husband’s
and children’s liberalism – and in order to prove herself a loving mother
and a caring wife – Kaukab makes a great effort to distance herself from
a “dirty country, an unsacred country full of people with disgusting
habits and practices”, but her dilemma is that she can never prevent
her children from assimilating into “[t]he decadent and corrupt West”
(63). As she says: “My Charag, my Mah-Jabin, my Ujala. Each time they
went out they returned with a new layer of stranger-ness on them until
finally I didn’t recognize them any more” (146).
This is what Aslam’s insular Asian immigrants suffer. Even within
their cultural cocoon, the people of Dasht-e-Tanhai are distanced from
each other: husband from wife, children from parents and rich from
poor. They are not only victims of migration to strange lands, but also
of self-imposed exile due to their unbearable confinement within the
fixed chrysalises of race, class, religion, sect and caste. Despite living
in England for years, Kaukab does not know “where and how … you
get a taxi in a strange city” (313). Drawing upon Santesso’s concept of
disorientation of Muslim immigrants in the West, I argue that Kaukab
remains “unsure of how to resolve … her faith with secular integration”
in a society that demands a rejection of her values, and above all her
religious identity; therefore she resorts to “severe alienation” (19–20).
She is often found mourning the loss of her Sohni Dharti (beautiful
land), “a country of the pious and the devout” (63). She pays a heavy
price for her unquestioning affiliation to Sohni Dharti and her loving
God: her daughter Mah-Jabin alienates herself by choosing to live in
“a strange country [America] full of strangers” (110); her son also walks
away upon discovering that Kaukab used to drug him with bromide
(on a cleric’s instructions) in order to make him a good Muslim; her
husband, Shamas, falls in love with another woman, Suraya, who is
searching for a man for Nikah halala1 so that she can re-marry her first
husband.
The characters of Aslam’s novels experience otherness within tra-
ditional places of comfort, such as the family and the home. Aslam’s
novels suggest that it is through an encounter with the figure of the
familiar stranger that one comes to realise the ontology of the subject
“who is recognised as ‘out of place’ in a given place” (Ahmed, Strange
Encounters 8). As Ahmed says: “we can ask: how does being-at-home
already encounter strangerness? … if we were to expand our definition
of home to think of the nation as a home, then we could recognise that
there are always encounters with others already recognised as strangers
within, rather than just between, nations” (Strange Encounters 88).
Kaukab’s position in her own home vis-à-vis her children can be
equated with the position of Karim in Kartography and that of Khaleel
in Salt and Saffron. Karim, who is Pakistani by birth, is “othered” on eth-
nic grounds by Raheen’s parents because his mother is Bengali. Union
between Karim and Raheen becomes complicated because of this ethnic
difference, as Raheen’s Aunty Runty suggests: “With Karim, you can’t
tell at all. That he’s half-Bengali. Never guess it. But let’s see – if one day
you decide your friend Karim is husband material, what will Daddy say
to that?” (Kartography 74). Similarly, middle-class Khaleel and Masood –
the latter a cook – are seen as less than perfect matches for Aliya
and Mariam Apa, who both belong to an aristocratic Nawab2 family.
Shamsie’s critique of the division of society on the basis of ethnicity and
class highlights the process of “othering” within one’s own society and
community. In Maps for Lost Lovers, too, Shamas’s and Jugnu’s positions
in their community suffer from instability due to their Hindu lineage as
“[t]heir father was born a Hindu … remembering his true identity only
in adulthood” (47). The fact that they were born and raised as Muslims
is, at times, completely ignored by their community.
A similar phenomenon of othering from the “inside” rather than
“outside” is illustrated by Aslam when Kaukab gets anxious over Mah-
Jabin’s encounter with a wealthy woman from Pakistan who shows
contempt towards the poor Pakistani community in the UK. According
to this woman, it is because of these poor people in the UK that she is
called a “darkie bitch” by a white man in the town centre. She grumbles:
The man who called me that name was filthy and stinking. And he
would not have called me that name if it had not been for the people
in this area, who have so demeaned Pakistan’s image in foreign coun-
tries. Imagine! He thought he could insult me, I who live in a house
Global Ummah 161
in Islamabad the likes of which he’d never see in his life, I who speak
better English than him, educated as I was at Cambridge, my sons
studying at Harvard right now. And it’s all the fault of you lot, you
sister-murdering, nose-blowing, mosque-going, cousin-marrying,
veil-wearing inbred imbeciles. (312)
Kaukab is equally resentful towards the elites of her Sohni Dharti as she,
too, complains: “We are driven out of our countries because of people
like her, the rich and the powerful. We leave because we never have any
food or dignity because of their selfish behaviour. And now they resent
our being here too. Where are we supposed to go?” (312). Kaukab’s
anxiety raises important questions with regard to the phenomenon of
othering. Do we really encounter strangers in strange lands only? Who
are “us” and ‘”them” in this process of othering? Kaukab’s estrangement
from her children as well as from parts of her own community within
the UK involves a process of transition, as suggested by Ahmed: “[t]o
become estranged from each other, for example, is to move from being
friends to strangers, from familiarity to strangeness”. It is not something
common that unites these migrants into a “we” but this problematic of
“uncommon estrangement” (Strange Encounters 92–93).
Neither does the idea that native or ancestral space is more friendly
or homely than diasporic space seem to work in either Shamsie’s or
Aslam’s novels. For Karim, in Kartography, Pakistan is both his home
and a migrant space. He is Pakistani by birth, but considered a migrant
because his mother is Bengali. Kaukab’s new home in diaspora is equally
unhomely because for her the real home is Sohni Dharti not Dasht-e-
Tanhai; but the fact is that she encounters strangers in both places.
Similarly, Kaukab’s feelings for her place of origin are quite different
from her children’s feelings for their culture of origin. Kaukab’s failure
to inhabit her present space is informed by her dislocation that triggers
nostalgic memories of a place she has once lived in. By contrast, the
same place of origin, for Kaukab’s children, triggers the worst memories
of their lives, which ultimately estranges them from their mother. Mah-
Jabin, Charag and Ujala reject Pakistani social mores that, according
to them, have trapped people of the land within “the cage of permit-
ted thinking” (110). When considering diasporic subjects’ affiliations
with their homeland, one cannot ignore the difference in the ways in
which second-generation individuals negotiate their identities com-
pared to first-generation diasporics. British-born children of immigrants
construct their identities in relation to their place of birth, consequently
feeling no genuine association with their parents’ homeland; Kaukab’s
children accordingly refuse to acknowledge the identities that their

mother is trying to impose on them.
Hence home and away, location and dislocation each destabilise the
migrant’s position. The opposition between home and away needs to be
questioned and other spaces of belonging found. A migrant subject tries
to create a space that is more familiar and more homely than the home,
which leaves him or her with no more desire or longing for ancestral
home. As Ahmed argues, “each time we are faced by an other, whom
we cannot recognise, we seek to find other ways of achieving recogni-
tion, not only by re-reading the body of this other who is faced, but
by telling the difference between this other, and other others” (Strange
Encounters 8). As my examples above reveal, it is not the homogeneity
but the heterogeneity of estrangement and memory that binds Aslam’s
migrant community.
This recognition of the others that we encounter in our everyday
lives and that belong to the same community as different potentially
expands the notion of identifying with the nation, which convention-
ally tends to rely upon a “distinction between who does and does
not belong within the nation space” (Ahmed, Strange Encounters 99).
Aslam’s fiction sometimes gestures towards the possibility that home
is more a psychological phenomenon than one based on geographical
location. But psychological affiliation is no guarantee of acceptance.
In The Wasted Vigil, Aslam’s third novel, Marcus Caldwell – an English
expatriate married to an outspoken Afghani doctor named Qatrina –
leaves “his own country in the West to set up home among them in the
East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake”
(86). He spends his whole life in the country with a hope that one day
he might be able to claim Afghanistan as his home. However, even
though “[h]is skin is dyed to fawn after the decades of strong sunlight
and heat, making him look almost like a native of this country, maybe
someone from the Nuristan province”, (58) Caldwell remains a stranger
to Afghans. As Ahmed puts it, “the discourse of nationhood operates at
both a psychic space and social level” (Strange Encounters 98). We thus
need to consider how the “stranger is an effect of processes of inclu-
sion and exclusion, or incorporation and expulsion, that constitute
the boundaries of bodies and communities, including communities of
living (dwelling and travel), as well as epistemic communities” (Strange
Encounters 6).
In The Wasted Vigil, Aslam accentuates the same process of inclu-
sion and exclusion at the regional level with regards to communities
and nations. Commenting on the relationship between Pakistan and
Global Ummah 163
Afghanistan in the aftermath of a series of migrations after the Soviet–

Afghan War of 1979–89, the narrator notes:
[h]ow the influx since 1979 of the millions of filthy Afghan refugees
had ruined the once beautiful city of Peshawar. Had led to what he
termed the “Kalashnikovisation” of his homeland. “Look at the shapes
of the two countries on a map and you’ll see that Afghanistan rests
like a huge burden on poor Pakistan’s back. A bundle of misery.” (196)
Such uprootings actually demonstrate how, as Brah observes, the

same “geographical and psychic space comes to articulate different
‘histories’ and how ‘home’ can simultaneously be a place of safety
and of terror” (180). Whereas Afghans with their militant nature and
Kalashnikov culture become a source of terror for Pakistanis in their
homeland (Pakistan), Zameen – Marcus and Qatrina’s daughter – leaves
Afghanistan because her own home becomes a terrorised place for her
in the wake of Soviet occupation: “Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan. In their
own country the land wanted to strike them dead and so did the sky,
and everyone wanted to get to a refugee camp in Pakistan where their
suffering would come to an end at last” (343). Similarly, Qatrina’s own
community takes her life in her homeland.
In The Blind Man’s Garden too, Mikal’s own homeland becomes a
place of terror for him. Jeo and Mikal, two foster brothers who are in
love with the same woman (Naheed), travel to Afghanistan without
informing their families so as to help wounded people rather than to
take part in any jihad. But before they reach Afghanistan on their mis-
sion of providing medical aid to civilians, they are taken by warlords
to fight against American soldiers. Jeo’s father Rohan, a retired teacher,
his daughter Yasmin and her husband Basie go to Peshawar in search
of Jeo and Mikal, but they are told that the brothers have already gone
to Afghanistan. Jeo – a medical student and the husband of Naheed – is
killed, and Mikal is sold by Afghan warlords to Americans who investi-
gate Mikal for possible links with al-Qaeda. After killing two American
soldiers in self-defence, Mikal begins his journey to his homeland,
Heer, which is portrayed by Aslam as a place of unimaginable violence.
In the same way as Zameen’s homeland in The Wasted Vigil becomes a
terrorised place for her in the wake of Soviet occupation, the American
presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan makes Mikal’s distance from his
home insurmountable in The Blind Man’s Garden as “[h]e makes several
haphazard journeys into surrounding towns, within the coronet of
mountains and hills that surround Peshawar” avoiding the main route
“in case the Americans are following him”. However, just a few miles
away from home, he feels that he “is an exile in his own homeland, his
eyes filled with uncrossable distances” (221). However, as a contrast to
Mikal’s homeland becoming a place of terror due to the US presence in
the region, Yasmin, Tara and Basie experience this fear at the hands of
their own extremist Muslim community (the Taliban) in Heer. Whilst
visiting Jeo’s grave, Yasmin is attacked by a “veiled [Taliban] woman”
who rebukes Yasmin for coming to graveyards: “Women are not allowed
into graveyards” (257). Tara complains: “What strange times are these …
when Muslims must fear other Muslims” (258). This process of being a
stranger in one’s home or even within one’s community calls for a re-
theorisation of the notion of the “other”. As Brah states:
It is important, therefore, to be attentive to the nature and type of

processes in and through which the collective “we” is constituted.
Who is empowered and who is disempowered in a specific construc-
tion of the “we”? How are social divisions negotiated in the construc-
tion of the “we”? What is the relationship of this “we” to its “others”?
Who are these others? This is a critical question. It is generally
assumed that there is a single dominant Other whose overarching
omnipresence circumscribes constructions of the “we”. (184)
I argue here that Aslam, in his novels, expands the definition of the
“other”, liberating it from the historical Orientalist binary of East and
West. There is no single, dominant “other” identified in his work; rather
there are multiple “others” in the form of insiders and outsiders who
collectively constitute migrants’ ontologies.
In order to highlight this process of “othering” within a community,
Aslam does not over-emphasise the presence of the British white com-
munity in Maps for Lost Lovers. He primarily focuses on intra-cultural
communal tensions and, in this respect, only the Pakistani commu-
nity is foregrounded in the novel. Whilst interviewing the author,
Michael O’Connor calls into question any efforts on Aslam’s part to
show mutual tolerance among multicultural societies. Aslam, how-
ever, clarifies that “only the WHITE England is absent” in his novel
(qtd in Waterman 22). Interestingly, Shamsie also uses this technique
of abstracting or neutralising foreign space in Salt and Saffron and
Kartography in order to propound her concept of otherness. Her novel
subverts the whole notion of labelling the West as central and the East
as marginal – the West being marginalised in her own territory. Where
Shamsie uses the technique to subvert the idea of “global subalternity”
Global Ummah 165
(Bhabha, “Unsatisfied” 88) as well as the marginalisation of the Asians

(the others) in the West, Aslam’s silenced white world is meant to fore-
ground the self-marginalisation of the Asian community in Britain,
particularly that of the first generation. What these migrants “share as
‘humans’ is the deferral of home”, the “experiences of what it means to
depart from a given place” (Ahmed, Strange Encounters 81), but it is dif-
ficult to homogenise the effect of that deferral on the migrant’s psyche,
or to identify whether the migrant subject nevertheless experiences a
“homing desire” or “desire for homeland”. It is difficult to say whether
Kaukab actually yearns for a home – her Sohni Dharti – or desires to feel
at home in Dasht-e-Tanhai. Kaukab’s children – “the imagined commu-
nities of modern nations” (Anderson 13) – seem to experience a similar
dilemma: on the one hand they undergo a desperate search for strong
human relations with their parents whilst “experiencing a constantly
challenged identity”, but on the other hand, they are perpetually
required to make themselves “at home in an interminable discussion
between a scattered historical inheritance and a heterogeneous present”
(Chambers, Migrancy 6).
The question related to Kaukab in the last paragraph brings us to the
crux of the matter. In contrast to Kaukab, her children are in some ways
privileged in having a choice to opt for this state of homelessness. As
Ahmed argues:
The subject who has chosen to be homeless, rather than is home-

less due to the contingency of “external” circumstances, is certainly
a subject who is privileged, and for whom having or not having a
home does not affect its ability to occupy a given space … because the
world is already constituted as its home. (Strange Encounters 83)
Shamas, a liberal patriarch, does not share his wife’s pining for their
native country; realising that he has forsaken the ancestral place in
search of a new homeland, he makes efforts to assimilate into foreign
space. Sharing their father’s liberal spirit, Kaukab’s children are happy
to be immersed in Western styles of living: Charag marries a white girl
named Stella, whilst Mah-Jabin leaves her husband in Pakistan, wears
Western clothes, cuts off her long hair and wants to live in America.
Completely disillusioned with their religion as well as the societal norms
of their mother’s country, Kaukab’s children try to make a place for
themselves in British society rather than among the people of the ances-
tral homeland, thereby opting for routes over roots (Clifford 302–338).
Despite all the pain and confusion involved, they are privileged in
having an “authentically migrant perspective” (Chambers, Migrancy 42)

in contrast to their mother, whom Aslam seems to define as an inauthen-
tic migrant who “believes in fixed entities and who refuses to transgress”
(Ahmed, Strange Encounters 82). In The Wasted Vigil this is also what
makes Marcus a privileged subject who, despite all his sufferings, privi-
leges a homing desire over desire for a homeland. Ahmed nicely sums
up the paradoxical situation of an authentic migrant: “the experiences
of migration, which can involve trauma and violence, become exoticised
and idealised as the basis of an ethics of transgression, an ethics which
assumes that it is possible to be liberated from identity as such, at the
same time as it ‘belongs’ to an authentically migrant subject” (Strange
Encounters 82).
Trauma, memory, melancholia
In this section, I demonstrate that Aslam’s novels highlight the need for
a reconceptualisation of immigrant identity by linking the traumatic
experiences of an individual to the collective memory of a community
or nation. Drawing on Freud, Butler, Abraham and Torok, and Eng and
Kazanjian’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, I investigate an
interface between transnational movement and mourning in order to
emphasise how private grief becomes a metonym of public grief. With
reference to Aslam’s work, I show how an endless process of diasporic
nostalgia and mourning interacts with immigrants’ efforts to deal with
different others.
In Maps for Lost Lovers, Kaukab’s inability to come to terms with the
place in which she is living turns her into a melancholic who, accord-
ing to Freud, “vilifies [her]self and expects to be cast out and punished”
(Gay 584). In “Mourning and Melancholia,” highlighting the symptoms
of what he calls psychogenic melancholia, Freud argues: “Where there
is a disposition to obsessional neurosis the conflict due to ambivalence
gives a pathological cast to mourning and forces it to express itself in
the form of self-reproaches to the effect that the mourner himself is to
blame for the loss of the loved object” (Gay 587, 588). In the case of
Kaukab, this loved object is her Sohni Dharti, her homeland. Kaukab’s
lamentations regarding immigration to the UK involve self-reproaches
such as the following: “If I tell you something everyday it’s because
I relive it every day. Every day – wishing I could rewrite the past –
I relive the day I came to this country where I have known nothing but
pain” (101). Probing deeper into Freud’s theory, it becomes clear that
for him, melancholia involves a “pathological tendency to deny the
Global Ummah 167
reality of this loss” (Ruti 637–660) and, consequently, the melancholic’s

inability to mourn or grieve prevents him/her from future progress.
This contrasts with Ranjana Khanna’s concept of melancholia that
“acts toward the future” because “the hope for a better persists” in the
melancholic (n.p.). Butler’s critique of Freud’s concept of melancholia
is also based on the fact that Freud tends to suggest that successful
mourning is the sign of substitutability. She argues that rather than
associating successful mourning with substitutability or with the act of
forgetting the loved object, as Freud suggests, mourning must be taken
as an “experience of transformation” because “one mourns when one
accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly
forever” (Precarious Life 21).
This hardly seems to be true in Kaukab’s case. She is the one who
remains unchanged throughout the novel. She neither progresses
towards the future nor shows any willingness to, as Butler puts it, sub-
mit to a transformation. In other words, as Waterman suggests, Kaukab
demonstrates “the sort of enclave mindset which hopes to guarantee a
fixed notion of identity rather than consider identity as an ongoing pro-
cess” (21). Whereas Freud’s melancholic subject fails to mourn, Kaukab
does mourn but her mourning does not entail “the progressive severing
of affective ties to what has been lost so as to free the subject to direct its
love and attention to new objects and endeavors” (Ruti 639). It might
be assumed that Kaukab’s efforts to establish a good relationship with
her children are a symptom of redirecting her love for the lost country,
but she utterly fails in this. In fact, as Freud suggests and Ruti also argues:
“[s]uch objects, which often take on a larger-than-life meaning and
magnificence, demand the individual’s loyalty so intensely that disa-
vowal becomes impossible” (639). Mah-Jabin’s marriage to her cousin in
Pakistan is one of the ways that Kaukab may prove her loyalty to her
own community in Pakistan; but in doing so, she becomes estranged
from her children who blame their mother for destroying their lives. As
Mah- Jabin says: “She has harmed every one of us” (Maps 302).
Abraham and Torok’s discourse on mourning and melancholy helps
me to situate Kaukab’s melancholic state in relation to “hostile external
forces.” According to Abraham and Torok:
melancholics cherish the memory as their most precious possession,

even though it must be concealed by a crypt built with the bricks of
hate and aggression. It should be remarked that as long as the crypt
holds, there is no melancholia. It erupts when the walls are shaken,
often as a result of the loss of some secondary love-object who had
buttressed them. Faced with the danger of seeing the crypt crum-
ble, the whole of the ego becomes one with the crypt, showing the
concealed object of love in its own guise. (136)
Kaukab is cocooned in her limited world of home where her life

revolves around her husband and children after she migrates to the
“Desert of Loneliness”. She manages to keep herself uncontaminated
by the godless West that “had deprived her of the glowing warmth that
people who are born of each other give out, the heat and light of an
extended family” (31). Undoubtedly, being a good Muslim, “Kaukab
knows her dissatisfaction with England is a slight to Allah … but she
cannot contain her homesickness and constantly asks for courage to
face this lonely ordeal that He has chosen for her in His wisdom” (31).
After the loss of her primary love-object, her homeland, Kaukab’s
children become her secondary love-objects. Despite their infrequent
visits, Kaukab’s life revolves around her children and she cherishes their
every visit, as well as her memories of their childhood. According to
Abraham and Torok’s poetics of the crypt, as long as Kaukab’s primary
love-objects, her country and her religion, remain secure from the dis-
paraging remarks of her children, she manages to stay calm. In other
words, “the gaping wound” of leaving her homeland, “opened long ago
within the ego” of Kaukab is “distinguished by a fantasmic and secret
construction in place of the very thing from which, through the loss,
the ego was severed”. As a result of this construction, Kaukab’s wound
is “disguised” and “unspeakable, because to state it openly would prove
fatal to the entire topography” (Abraham and Torok 142). However,
she fails to remain calm when she is humiliated by her secondary love-
objects, her children. In a bitter encounter between mother and daugh-
ter on the issue of Mah-Jabin’s marriage, when Mah-Jabin rebukes her
mother’s beloved country and her sham tradition of cousin marriages,
Kaukab becomes, in her daughter’s words, “the most dangerous animal
she’ll ever have to confront” (111). Kaukab slaps Mah-Jabin, knock-
ing her “off the chair” (112). The more that Mah-Jabin reproaches her
mother for “the so-called traditions that you have dragged into this
country with you like shit on your shoes” (114), the more Kaukab goes
mad with pain. Mah-Jabin accuses her mother of having failed to save
her daughter’s life by not telling her that the life of women in Pakistani
society is “hard because [they] have to run the house during the day and
listen to [their] husband’s demands in bed at night”. She even questions
her mother’s wisdom for not only living her own life in despair, but
also forcing her daughter into the same life and “expecting a different
Global Ummah 169
result” (113). Kaukab receives another blow to her ego when Mah-Jabin
says: “How fucking wise you are, Mother, such wisdom! Victory awaits
all the beleaguered Pakistani women but what a price, Mother, two
decades of your life wasted … What a waste when instead of conniv-
ing for all these years you could just walk away” (114). At this stage,
Kaukab’s ego – which constitutes her self-esteem as well as her tolerance
towards the decadent West through love for her religion and country –
begins to shake and we hear her melancholic cry: “Get away from me,
you little bitch!” (114).
Charag similarly scolds his mother, referring to his circumcision as
“the first act of violence done to [him] in the name of a religious or
social system … wonder[ing] if anyone has the right to do it” (320).
Kaukab’s ego is hurt again and she winces: “Why must you mock my
sentiments and our religion like this?” (320). Ujala too reproaches his
mother for poisoning him with holy salt on the advice of a cleric, mock-
ing the religion that has given her and millions like her such false ideas.
As a result of this humiliation at the hands of her own children, the
crypt crumbles and Kaukab’s ego becomes one with the love object:
she realises that it was the biggest mistake of her life to come to this
country – “a country where children are allowed to talk to their par-
ents this way, a country where sin is commonplace” (324). Hence,
Kaukab’s ego “begins the public display of an interminable process of
mourning” (Abraham and Torok 136). Her grief does not remain her
private grief; it manifests itself as public grief that has affected not only
her own life but her husband’s and children’s as well.
This is how the grief of one generation transfers to the next generation.
As Waterman observes with regard to Maps for Lost Lovers:
the parents’ memories do not correspond at all to their children’s

lived experience, meaning that the parents’ cultural map, created
out of a traumatic past and clung to out of a sense of familiarity
and security, has in fact done a great deal of harm to their children,
which explains the parents’ abject, suicidal loss of hope at the end
of the novel. (30)
Following Waterman’s argument, I argue that Kaukab’s “narcissistic

preoccupation of melancholia” ultimately “move[s] into a considera-
tion of vulnerability of others” (Butler, Precarious Life 30). In this case it
is her children and her husband who, as a reaction to her melancholic
longings for her love objects, have become more British than Pakistani,
more Western than Muslim. Kaukab’s children feel “othered” in their
own home. Her personal grief has put her children and husband in a
vulnerable situation whereby inter-cultural conflicts take the shape of
intra-cultural conflicts and her children refuse to assume any respon-
sibility for their roots. Given his traumatic position in Dasht-e-Tanhai,
Shamas’s position can be described as the one:
[f]aced with a loss of roots, and the subsequent weakening in the grammar
of “authenticity”, we move into a vaster landscape. Our sense of belong-
ing, our language and the myths we carry in us remain, but no longer as
“origins” or signs of “authenticity” capable of guaranteeing the sense of
our lives. They now linger on as traces, voices, memories and murmurs
that are mixed in with other histories, episodes, encounters. (Chambers,
Migrancy 18–19)
However, unlike Shamas, Kaukab’s traumatic sense of grief rids her

children of what Chambers calls a “grammar of authenticity” since
they belong neither “here” nor “there”. Nevertheless, completely dis-
illusioned with their mother’s sense of belonging and melancholic
nostalgia, their state of unbelonging and confusion has made them
think that the only way to “make cultural mobility and integration less
traumatic” is to move “away from the absolutes and certitudes of fixed
cultural identity and toward an identity which does not retreat from
flexibility and negotiation” (Waterman 32). Examples of this include
Charag’s marriage to an English girl and Mah-Jabin’s audacious step to
divorce her Pakistani husband in order to live her own life in America.
In my view, both examples are emblematic of second-generation immi-
grants’ integration into the West. By distancing themselves from their
culture of origin, they reconstruct their identities in order to attain what
Chambers calls the “grammar of authenticity”.
A similar phenomenon can be explained in The Wasted Vigil with ref-
erence to Casa and James, who are willing to sacrifice their lives for their
homelands and people. Set against the background of post-9/11 “war
on terror” rhetoric, the novel highlights the struggle of a young Afghan
mujahid called Casa against the US Army, which, in turn, is countering
the terrorist activities of mujahideen in Afghanistan. James, a US official,
is on this mission in Afghanistan. When analysed in terms of Abraham
and Torok’s poetics of the crypt, Casa’s struggle of “love and hate” – that
“results from some traumatic affliction and from the utter impossibil-
ity of mourning” – implies that his “aggression is not in fact primary;
it merely extends the genuine aggression the object actually suffered
earlier in the form of … disgrace, or removal” (Abraham and Torok 136).
Global Ummah 171
It is not only Casa’s religion that has been disgraced by the American
infidels; there has also been a constant effort on their part to expel him
and other mujahideen from their own country. Casa’s melancholic state
of mind is evident during his conversation with Duniya:
For reasons she doesn’t understand he brings his hands forwards and
displays the palms. He thinks she can see something in his lifelines?
But what he says next makes it clear that he is someone traumatised
by the United States’ invasion:
“I hate America.”
There is a deliberation before each of his words, which seem care-

fully chosen as a result. She has the feeling that he is searching for
the most stable and most direct bridge between his inner self and the
world. (Wasted 318)
However, Casa’s ego becomes a public display when his beloved objects
are degraded by James, who expresses his anger against Islam and
Afghanistan – a place, James believes, that nurtures “the children of the
devil” like him: “They have no choice but to spread destruction in the
world” (413). While addressing David, James says: “We have a new kind
of enemy, David. They are allowed to read the Koran at Guantanamo Bay,
as their religious and human right. But have you read it? They don’t need
jihadi literature – they’ve got the Koran. Almost every other page is a call
to arms, a call to slaughter us infidels” (292–293). As a result of this insult
to his religion, Casa directs his aggression at the external world – the
US Army in Afghanistan – and he does not hesitate even to kill his own
saviour, David. After all, he cannot “let someone obliterate Islam” (319).
Similar melancholic feelings reside in James when he tortures Casa and
other jihadists in Afghanistan. Being an American soldier, he has a duty
to his nation and the people who lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks, “a
national tragedy” ( Jackson 32). When fulfilling the duty given to him
by his State to expel the Taliban and prevent their return, James feels
justified in being cruel to the mujahideen. Responding to criticism that
the US Army treated mujahideen and the Taliban with cruelty, he argues:
“Why must the United States be the only one asked to uphold the high-
est standards? No one in the world is innocent but these Muslims say
they are … So until everyone admits that they are capable of cruelty –
and not define their cruelty as just – there will be problems” (295). If
analysed objectively, none of these three characters – James, Casa and
Bihzad – feel guilty for their atrocities against innocent people. It is also
in this context that Abraham and Torok’s concept of melancholia is

important; it provides a justification for not feeling guilty or ashamed of
the worst things that a melancholic subject may do – a concept that is
not explained by Freud. As Abraham and Torok argue: “the more suffer-
ing and degradation the object undergoes (meaning: the more he pines
for the subject he lost), the prouder the subject can be” (136). Taking
on his mission to protect and defend his homeland from the terrorist
attacks of al-Qaeda suicide bombers, James feels proud of devastating
the Afghan population because, by attacking the World Trade Center,
al-Qaeda degraded his nation. Likewise, Casa and Bihzad are proud to
have been jihadists because Allah has ordered them to fight against
infidels who are abusing their religion. Lara says more or less the same
thing about Stepan’s pride in fighting for his country, irrespective of
the massacres of innocent civilians that he is responsible for: “When it
came to what he called his nation, his tribe, he too suffered from a kind
of blindness: he saw what he wanted to. ‘You think your principles are
higher than reality,’ he’d say to me” (391).
Butler’s model of melancholia helps us to understand how our indi-
vidual memories are framed by national consciousness, and how grief
that is generally considered to be private in fact “furnishes a sense of
political community of a complex order” (Precarious Life 22). Aslam’s
novels show that in diasporic environments, in particular, there is no
clear line dividing public and private grief or individual and collective
memory. Therefore, Casa’s and James’s experiences of melancholia are
expressions of their respective nations’ sorrow. Both are antagonistic
towards each other. Casa, as a jihadi, is targeting the Americans who are
responsible for killing jihadists, and James is targeting Afghans because
they are responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians in the 9/11
attacks. Each of them is suffering because of their respective nations’
sorrow. What Aslam is trying to show is that their “[s]uffering[s] can
yield an experience of humility … of impressionability and dependence,
and these can become resources, if we do not ‘resolve’ them too quickly;
they can move us beyond and against the vocation of the paranoid
victim who regenerates infinitely the justifications for war” (Butler,
Precarious Life 149, 150).
Accentuating the relationship posited here between individual and
nation, Gilroy asserts that “memory of the country at war against foes
who are simply, tidily, and uncomplicatedly evil has recently acquired
the status of an ethnic myth. It explains not only how the nation
remade itself through war and victory but can also be understood as a
rejection or deferral of its present problems” (89). The obsession with
Global Ummah 173
love objects in the individual or collective memory, either in the form

of religion or nationalism, actually “institutionalize[s] the melancholic
reaction”, which entails only violence rather than “transforming para-
lyzing guilt into a more productive shame” that would be conducive
to a state that is “no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to
either strangers or otherness” (Gilroy 99).
Invoking Alexander Mitscherlich’s concept of melancholia – which
has its basis in Germans’ reactions to the death of Hitler – Gilroy situ-
ates his discussion in post-9/11 Britain and its “failure to appreciate the
brutalities of colonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit,
to understand the damage it did to their political culture at home
and abroad” (99). However, the overarching argument is relevant to
the global scenario of contemporary power relations. The Wasted Vigil
attempts to draw our attention to US imperial ventures, its interference
and its dire consequences in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. As
Marcus says bitterly: “[t]he entire world … had fought in this country,
had made mistakes in this country, but mistakes had consequences
and he didn’t know who to blame for those consequences. Afghanistan
itself, Russia, the United States, Britain, Arabia, Pakistan?” (40) He says:
“the West was involved in the ruining of this place … There would have
been no downfall if this country had been left to itself by those others”
(87). There is no denial of the fact, as also highlighted by Gilroy in the
European context, that the US not only fails to admit the harm it has
done in parts of the world, whether Afghanistan, Iran or Japan, but it
has also played a significant role in inculcating xenophobia against
Muslims among Americans and Europeans through media-based “war
on terror” propaganda as well as through concealing facts from its own
public. Hertsgaard reports:
During the military campaigns, the Pentagon’s refusal to allow

reporters to accompany troops in Afghanistan, and the practice of
embedding reporters in the Iraq operation, was a blatant attempt to
censor information reported during the fighting. When a Washington
Post war correspondent tried to investigate civilian casualties in a
village in Afghanistan, he was prevented at gunpoint by American
troops from reaching the site. (qtd in Jackson 170)
This is what Marcus says to Lara: “Through stories we judge our actions
before committing them” (87); the stories that made nations; the stories
that create stereotypes. James’s anxiety to know about Casa reflects the
construction of narratives of terror through “[t]he language of threat
and danger [that] saturates the discourse of the ‘war on terrorism’” since
the 11 September attack ( Jackson 95).
Whereas a refusal to mourn hinders and retards the subject’s and the
nation’s progression into the future, the act of mourning “[d]espite our
differences in location and history … appeal[s] to a ‘we,’” and teaches
us “what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us
all” (Butler, Precarious Life 20). In The Wasted Vigil, Marcus and Lara tend
to submit to transformation without forgetting the loved object, despite
their losses. Eng and Kazanjian’s discourse on the understanding of
“loss” is useful for discussing Marcus’s positive embrace of melancholia.
They suggest that “a better understanding of melancholic attachments
to loss might depathologize those attachments, making visible not only
their social bases but also their creative, unpredictable, political aspects”
(3). Marcus’s loss is inseparable from his being: his lost hand and ruined
home are constant reminders of his wife’s tragic death, ultimately mak-
ing depression and despair his permanent fate. Yet, his effort to find his
grandson makes him a futurist, and, by recalling the past, he develops a
relationship with it that is “creative” and “active” rather than “reactive”
(Eng and Kazanjian 2). Moreover, Marcus urges Lara to “go back and
take charge of these matters intelligently. You must delve deeper into
Stepan’s death, try to discover what your country’s government and
your country’s army is doing” (Wasted 417). Marcus’s suggestion to Lara
accentuates what Eng and Kazanjian describe as the creative, social and
political aspects of a subject’s attachment to loss. In this context, my
views corroborate Lindsey Moore’s that this is how Aslam’s “readers
are encouraged to consider in what ways memory, melancholia and
mourning might be put at the service of a more inclusive conception of
national and global communities” (17).
Diasporic Muslim identities
Processes of deterritorialisation in the present era have not only put into
question the affiliation of diasporic subjects to their native lands, but
have also challenged claims to identities based on nation and culture, or
what may be called the “fantasy of the one nation-one people” (Kalra,
Kaur and Hutnyk 32). As discussed earlier, even transnational identi-
ties do not offer neat solutions to the problems of diaspora, because
the migrant not only becomes a stranger in the original homeland but
also in the host land. This “strangerness” calls for a new conception of
“the space from which one imagines oneself to have originated, and
in which one projects the self as both homely and original” (Ahmed,
Global Ummah 175
Strange Encounters 77). No wonder, then, that the affiliation of Pakistani

diasporic writers to a migrant ontology based on faith provides them
with a universal condition in which they may claim to belong. This is
what Kwame Anthony Appiah describes as a global tribe (138) – or in
this case the Muslim global ummah – which transcends geographical
barriers. According to Miriam Cooke, Muslims “‘can think transnation-
ally while retaining deep connections with a specific place, whether it
be of birth, of choice, or of compulsion’ because Muslims’ identity is
‘geographically flexible’ and ‘oscillates between diaspora and origin’”
(qtd in Malak, Muslim Narratives 65). Besides the inherent “global,
cross-cultural reach” of Islamic faith and civilisation that “embraces
diversities of languages, races, ethnicities, and regions” (Malak, Muslim
Narratives 5), Muslim identities have shown a greater degree of flex-
ibility in terms of affiliation to Islam over the last few decades and
most recently in the aftermath of 9/11. This also explains why second-
generation writers of Pakistani origin have started to identify predomi-
nantly as Muslims since 9/11.
Born and brought up in Pakistan in a Muslim family, Aslam has
described himself as a non-believer. However, when the 9/11 attacks
affected Muslims individually as well as globally – by way of ensuing
public discussions about Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, jihad, and
what Islam stands for – Aslam felt a need to rethink his identity and has
subsequently described himself as a non-practising Muslim. As he says:
“I am a cultural Muslim. … religion is not something I have faith in. We
are born, we live – hopefully happily – and we die”. When asked if he is
a Muslim, he says: “Before 9/11, I would have said no, but now I insist
I am. It is time that moderate Muslims like myself stand up and say
we are all not fundamentalists or Islamists” (Gill n.p.). Such Muslims,
caught in the process of redefining what it means to be a Muslim, shift
the focus away from the radicals preaching hardline Islam. They are
aware of the fact that just saying Islam is a religion of peace rather than
war and violence is not going to suffice and that more is being asked
of them. Emphasising a similar commitment to faith-based identities
and yet a need to reconsider “details of their identification with Islam,”
Akeel Bilgrami observes that a conflict prevails within the hearts of
moderate Muslims with regard to their own commitment to Islam and
“opposition to Islamic absolutism” which will not be resolved unless
they acknowledge “the need for a reform of the faith” (821, 824).
This attitude calls for the redefining of the terms “Islamist” and
“Muslim”. Malak and Roy highlight an ambiguity regarding these terms,
specifically with reference to second-generation Muslims in Britain in the
aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. While Malak defines Islamists as practis-

ing believers and Muslims as those who are affiliated to Islam by pristine
culture or origin (Muslim Narratives 5), for Roy a Muslim is someone who
says he or she is a Muslim, and not someone who is a Muslim by culture
or origin. Accentuating the “transient and uncertain nature of [Muslim]
identities” in terms of political, ethnic or geographical references, Roy
asks: “Should the term Muslim refer to a self-declared believer or to any-
body with a familial background linked with a Muslim society? … Are
there atheist Muslims?” (102). As I have explained in the Introduction,
I find synthesis between Malak’s and Roy’s definitions. For me, the term
“Muslim” features both its purely religious and its cultural dimensions in
contrast to the term “Islamist” that I broadly refer in this monograph to
any form of political Islam. It is also in this context that writers such as
Rushdie, Aslam and Kureishi are discussed as Muslim writers in this book.
Nevertheless, to be more specific in religious and cultural dimensions,
I have used the terms “practising Muslims” and “non-practising Muslims”
respectively. These questions are pertinent in categorising writers such as
Kureishi, Rushdie and Aslam who are self-declared non-believers and yet
Muslims by origin, ethnicity or choice.
It is important to highlight this because Aslam’s novels are replete
with references to Islamic laws that provoke debates among Western
scholars with regard to the propaganda that Islam is a religion of vio-
lence. Aslam’s bitterness towards Islamic jurisprudence indicates that he
identifies himself with “moderate Muslims” whose “roots are situated
in the culture and civilization of Islam” (Malak, Muslim Narratives 5),
but who, at the same time, oppose Islamic absolutism. I would argue
instead that Aslam’s eclectic approach towards Islamic law seems to
complicate and question his own opposition to Islamic absolutism.
However, I would argue that Aslam’s upbringing and background – a
blend of religious orthodoxy and communism – have impacted his
world, which also lends an Orientalist tenor to the representation of
Islam in his novels.
Aslam unhesitatingly condemns the Islamist approach of clerics in all
of his novels. In The Wasted Vigil, recalling his childhood memories at
a madrassa, Casa ruminates:
These dozens of clerics – the emir, the haji, the hafiz, the maul-
ana, the sheikh, the hazrat, the alhaaj, the shah, the mullah, the
janab, the janabeaali, the khatib, the molvi, the kari, the kazi, the
sahibzada, the mufti, the olama, the huzoor, the aalam, the baba,
the syed – had frightened him as they preached when he was very
Global Ummah 177
young, moving unpredictably across the full register of the human

voice, from the whisper to the growl to the full-throated shout,
now screaming, now weeping, now vituperative and righteous, now
plaintive and melodious. (219)
In the first few pages of Aslam’s first novel Season of the Rainbirds, read-
ers encounter the character of Uncle Shujahat with a “black beard” who
is “to be avoided” because he hates toys, dolls and masks and “breaks
them in two, and hands them back” (2). More or less the same issue
is highlighted in The Wasted Vigil through references to “bonfires of
books” (239) that contain images and pictures of living beings during
the reign of the Taliban, because “Allah forbids photography. The only
exception to this a Muslim must reluctantly make in today’s world is
the photo needed for a passport: to go on the pilgrimage in Mecca, or to
cross borders for the purposes of jihad” (285). In The Blind Man’s Garden,
Sofia, Rohan’s wife, is seen by her husband to have committed the sin
of making pictures, which Rohan believes is a symbol of “disobeying
Allah, who forbade such images lest they lead to idolatry”. Therefore,
fearing Allah’s wrath, Rohan “had cleansed the house of every other
image too, every photograph and picture, even those not created by
her” (21). For an artist like Aslam, this justification is quite illogical and
unacceptable. He says in one of his interviews:
I felt it unusual that Ian McEwan got into trouble for saying he hates
Islamists. I hate them too; I know them. I have written about an
uncle who breaks toys because toys are idols. I had an uncle like that.
He was a Wahhabi and came as a tableeghi to teach Islam in Europe,
and went to the Dewsbury mosque in the early years, where the July
7 bombers were radicalized. (Gill n.p.)
There is no holistic reference to the prohibition of pictures in the Qur’an.

However, there are a couple of very strong ahadith about the prohibition
of pictures of humans and animals. For example, in one of the ahadith,
the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) says: “The makers of these pictures
will be punished (severely) on the Day of Resurrection and it will be
said to them, ‘ Make alive what you have created.’” He adds, “Angels do
not enter a house in which there are pictures” (Al-Bukhari 4: 448). From
the context, it is clear that Aslam is referring to this and other similar
ahadith in his novels. However, the problem increases when it comes to
his oversimplified assertions regarding hadith, fiqh or even Islamic juris-
prudence. Islam is a universal religion that is not confined to a specific
time or age: it is irrational to assume that the Qur’an/Islam would

preach anything that contradicts the requirements of modern life (such
as prohibition of pictures etc.). Moreover, ahadith referred to repeatedly
by Aslam in his novels (that are context-specific) are decontextualised.3
Hence, what Aslam refers to in his novels reflects a narrow (and often
relatively uneducated), rather than a scholarly approach towards the
interpretation of ahadith.
At times, Aslam’s resentment towards Islamic jurisprudence and his
consequent discussions about honour killing, fornication, marriage and
divorce seem to contribute to an Islamophobic climate. In this respect,
the question of whether Aslam is writing primarily for informed Muslim
readers or for Western readers – who are not familiar with Islamic juris-
prudence – becomes crucial. For example, Suraya’s story in Maps for Lost
Lovers has been depicted in such a way that the whole concept of mar-
riage, divorce and halala seems a distortion of the real concept of mar-
riage in Islam. Suraya says in the novel that “Allah is not being equally
compassionate towards the poor woman … It’s as though Allah forgot there
were women in the world when he made some of his laws, thinking only of
men” (150). It is important to remember that Aslam’s novel deals with
the issue either from the point of view of people’s partial and skewed
understandings of religion, or, as I have argued earlier, from his own
experiences of life that veer towards two extremes: religious orthodoxy
and secular communism. Suraya is shown to be a victim of shariah law,
which forces a woman to marry a second person before she can re-marry
her first husband. This is a clear example of misunderstood Islam:
under Islamic law, the punishment Suraya’s husband must receive –

for getting drunk and for not taking the matter of divorce seriously
enough – is that he can have any woman except one … But – such
is Allah’s compassion towards his creatures! – she is not barred to
him permanently: if the woman who has been recklessly divorced
can fulfill the requirement that Suraya is having to fulfill, then the
original husband can possess her again. Limitless is Allah’s kindness
towards his creation. (Maps 150)
Aslam fails to highlight the relevant point that halala cannot be planned
in advance because nikah (the matrimonial contract between husband
and wife according to Islamic marriage) between the woman and her
second husband, with an understanding of a divorce afterwards, will
not be valid at all. After he divorces his wife a man can only re-marry
that woman if in the meantime she has been married to someone else
Global Ummah 179
and her marriage collapses for genuine reasons. She cannot marry
another man with an intention of doing halala (as Suraya is shown to
be doing in the novel). Also worthy of mention is that the word halala
is not used in the Qur’an or hadith; only the condition for remarrying
a first husband is explained.4 The word halala is taken from the word
al-tahleel, which is explained according to one of the works of Ibn
Taymiyyah – a medieval theologian and a jurist. According to the bayan
of Ibn Taymiyyah, a man who marries a woman with the intention of
divorcing her after the consummation of marriage – in order that she
can remarry her first husband (where the woman remains ignorant of
his intention) – is called “Al-Muhallil [in the hadith] and if he intended
al-tahleel [pre-planned halala], then he is cursed [as in the hadith].”5
Likewise, strict Islamic punishments (hudood) – often considered as
brutal and inhumane – related to rape, adultery or what (as I will explain)
is confused with honour killing, are not as easy to implement as Aslam
suggests in the novel:
under Pakistan’s Islamic law, rape had to have male witnesses who
confirmed that it was indeed rape and not consensual intercourse;
the girl did not have witnesses and therefore would be found guilty
of sex outside marriage, sentenced to flogging, and sent to prison,
marked an abominable sinner from then on, a fallen woman and a
prostitute for the rest of her life. (Maps 157)
Close analysis of the above accusation will actually highlight the ration-
ale behind such strict punishments as well as Aslam’s misinterpretation
of the said law. Hudood ordinance is often condemned as anti-women,
due to Clause Three of the Qazaf Ordinance. Within the legal system in
place today, according to Muhammad Taqi Usmani (a former judge of
the Shariat Court of Pakistan), it is not difficult for lawyers and spouses
to make false accusations against women’s character due to the major
“failings of the Protection of Women’s Rights Bill” (26). Usmani in
fact requests the concerned authorities to amend the Bill in order to
bring it into conformity with the injunctions of the Holy Qur’an and
sunnah. Islam, on the other hand, protects the honour of chaste women
by imposing strict punishments on the slanderer if he fails to provide
evidence to support his accusations. Moreover, no woman can be sen-
tenced to flogging unless four witnesses lay an allegation against the
woman as is clear from the following Qur’anic verse: “And those who
launch a charge against chaste women and produce not four witnesses
(to support their allegations) flog them with eighty stripes and reject
their testimony forever” (24: 4). Since it is almost impossible, in prac-

tice, to find four witnesses, it is not easy to enforce this punishment.
Likewise, Aslam obfuscates the testimony of female witnesses when
Ujala says to Kaukab: “Their [women’s] testimony in a court of law is
worth half that of a man” (321). The same confusion is highlighted in
The Wasted Vigil with reference to the rape of a girl: “She told them it
was rape but no one believed her. The cleric at the mosque demand-
ing she produce – as Islamic law required of a violated woman – four
witnesses who must be male and must be Muslim to confirm that she
had not consented. This was Allah’s commandment and could not be
questioned” (300). Aslam repeatedly brings these issues into his writ-
ings, which serve to replicate his own misconception about Islamic
laws. In The Blind Man’s Garden, Naheed’s mother, Tara is also shown to
be the victim of shariat law when she is assaulted by a man. She goes
to the police and “they demanded – in accordance with Sharia law –
proof from four male witnesses that it was indeed an assault and not
consensual intercourse. There were no such witnesses, of course, and
Tara was jailed for adultery” (104). However, nowhere in the Qur’an do
we find that women’s testimony is worth half of that of a man except
in business matters (see Surah al Baqarah, verse 282). The Qur’anic verse
above does not differentiate between male or female witnesses, mean-
ing that a female can also be a witness in adultery cases without any
discrimination.
Secondly, punishments related to adultery need to be distinguished
from punishments for honour killing. In fact, Aslam conflates the two
in the story of Chanda and Jugnu, who were killed by Chanda’s broth-
ers using honour killing as an excuse because the couple were living a
life of sin according to Islamic law. Kaukab also says that Jugnu died
because of the way he lived. Nadia Butt similarly asserts that “when
Chanda’s brothers are arrested for murdering their sister and her lover,
their community believes that they should be exonerated for defending
the honour of Islam” (159). According to Butt:
[t]he theme of “honour killing” runs parallel to the theme of “forced

marriage”, emphasising the disastrous consequences of practicing
religion in its most rigid form. Such inhuman practices are carried
out under the impression of adhering to the purest forms of religion
because conventional Muslims consider Islam to be a pure religion.
This is the reason that there is no room for cultural or religious hybrid-
ity in their version of Islam; the Koran and Hadith (the tradition of
Mohammed) have declared it as a perfect code of life. (158)
Global Ummah 181
Butt’s analysis of the novel also fails to distinguish cultural from religious
norms. There is no such thing as “honour killing” in Islam. Honour kill-
ing is a tribal custom rather than an Islamic punishment.6 It cannot be
denied, however, that there are abusive marriages and honour killings
in Pakistan.
Aslam’s short story “Leila in the Wilderness” is also a bitter critique
of forced marriages and the stigma of failing to produce male off-
spring. Leila – a fourteen-year-old girl – is married against her will and
repeatedly gives birth to female offspring. She is not only threatened
and abused by her husband and her mother-in-law for doing so, but
is subject to various punishments in the form of religious rituals and
spells to ensure the birth of a baby boy. Going through all this, Leila
feels “terror and then a rage and grief the size of the sky, the rage of the
damned and the abandoned, and she imagined once again her mother
on the dawn lake, struggling powerlessly in the mist with her assail-
ants” (“Leila” 42). These are the “small scale 9/11s that go on everyday”
that Aslam condemns in his novels (Kapur n.p.). As Lindsey Moore
says: “Aslam performs a principled act of testimony in placing honour
crimes, clearly denounced as terrorizing cultural practices, at the heart
of the community of Maps” (16). My point is not that there are no
honour killings in Pakistan, nor that Aslam’s targeting of tribal customs
is unjustified. I would contend, however, that Aslam’s fictional world
and Butt’s analysis conflate ignominious tribal customs with Islamic
laws in such a way that their difference is lost on a non-Muslim reader.
Said points out the same conflationary discourse of Islam/Islamic cul-
ture/Muslim practices when he argues that Islam “defines a relatively
small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world,
which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries,
societies, traditions, languages and, of course, an infinite number of
different experiences. It is simply false to try to trace all this back to
something called ‘Islam’” (Covering Islam [1997] xvi). A depiction that
blames everything bad on religion and tradition inevitably involves
a degree of one-sidedness. This is the problem that Malak highlights
when he says:
More importantly, Muslims themselves have divergent views about

the details and dogmas of the faith. When applied indiscriminately,
clichés such as “moderate,” “liberal” and “fundamentalist” are often
more confusing than clarifying, because these are subjective, value-
laden, context-specific terms that are conditioned by cultural norms
and individual predilections. (Muslim Narratives 152)
By confusing “quotidian forms of terrors” (Moore 3) with religion,

Aslam’s depictions contribute towards an Islamophobic climate rather
than an attempt to reconfigure the position of Muslims in the post-9/11
world, as I will explore further in my next section.
Global ummah
This section interrogates the taxonomy of terror(ism) that reinforces

Muslim identity as the chimerical “other” in the post-9/11 period,
alongside analysis of the concurrent reframing of (diasporic) Muslim
identities. Certain identities grounded in religious belief systems and
faith practices, such as “Islamic nationalism” (Malak, Muslim Narratives
17), face serious challenges in the context of increasing Western public
discourses about violence, terrorism and suicide bombing, particularly
after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The
9/11 attacks energised the conflict between belief and non-belief. This
clash, however, goes back further, notably to the fatwa issue related
to The Satanic Verses, as I discussed in Chapter 1. The conviction with
which the “New Atheists” write against Islam and specifically target
jihadist ideology furthers anti-Islamist sentiments. Arthur Bradley and
Andrew Tate highlight the New Atheist abhorrence of religious beliefs
and the assertion that “religion kills” (1). Defining Islam as a religion
of violence, Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens “see the figure of the suicide
bomber – not as a modern aberration or distortion of Islam – but as
the logical conclusion of the Muslim creed” (Bradley and Tate 5). This
branding of Islam as a religion of barbarism, fanaticism, irrationality
and immorality by a new breed of Western Orientalists has encouraged
a process of targeting Muslim populations as suspicious and dangerous.
In other words, the events of 11 September 2001 triggered a more pro-
nounced dichotomy between the West and its “Oriental Other” – Islam.
This growing antagonism against Islam and Muslims has transformed
the views of second-generation Muslim immigrants (particularly in the
Europe and the US) who have chosen to recast their identities in diverse
ways. One response, which I focus on here, is to claim allegiance to a
universal ummah. Faith appears to be emerging as a more pertinent ref-
erence than nation for second-generation immigrants who endeavour
to construct a virtual faith community that is not linked to a specific
territory or culture of origin.
In the previous section, I began my discussion by highlighting the
problematic conflation of Islam and Islamic extremism in Aslam’s
novels. This conflationary rhetoric, I suggested, not only contributes
Global Ummah 183
towards Islamophobic narratives, but also risks overlooking US impe-

rialistic ventures in the subcontinent and the Middle East. However,
I also argued that such a conflation is not due to Aslam’s hatred of
Islam, but to his own limited understanding of the Qur’an and Islam.
I also discussed in the previous section ways in which Aslam’s novels
provide a strong rebuttal of “war on terror” rhetoric and present a cri-
tique of the war that has been imposed on the innocent civilians of
Afghanistan and Pakistan in the aftermath of 9/11. In so doing, Aslam’s
novels foreground circumstances (domestic and global) and reasons
that compel his Muslim characters to identify themselves with the
broader notion of ummah that undermines any kind of reductive and
intolerant absolutism within their faith. However, as Malak says: “This
religion-oriented-paradigm and all its identitarian and aesthetic corol-
laries are often over-looked or viewed with suspicion in Western secular
discourses” (Muslim Narratives 152).
Aslam’s limited understanding of Islam, in certain cases, gives the
same impression in The Wasted Vigil when, for example, Casa, a young
Afghan militant, is shown to be chanting the words of Qur’an: “I will
instil terror in the hearts of the infidels, strike off their heads, and strike off
from them every finger-tip” (123). In another place, the narrator says
provocatively: “The religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the
study of science, does not believe the world runs along rational and
predictable laws” (133). Here, Aslam crosses the line between a critique
of radical Islamists and a critique of the Islamic faith, and tends to make
broad generalisations.7 His novel is loaded with examples and references
that relentlessly couple the Qur’anic text with the violent activities of
terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda. Although Aslam himself clari-
fies this misperception with regard to his views on Islam that the above
“thought came from Lara” (Chambers, British Muslim Fictions 141) and
not himself, The Wasted Vigil nevertheless encourages a conflationary
reading of the extremist ideology of Islamists and what the Qur’an says.
Such Qur’anic verses, when taken out of context, serve as the basis for
misunderstanding, as James’s response in the novel illustrates: “[t]hey
[jihadists] don’t need jihadi literature – they’ve got the Koran” (Wasted
292). There is no denying that Aslam’s intention is to provide vary-
ing perspectives on the issue of Islamic extremism by delving into the
minds of different characters “through indirect discourse” (Chambers,
British Muslim Fictions 141), but distinctions between Islam and Islamic
extremism, terrorists and jihadist (and by this I mean freedom fighters
rather than terrorists), and the Taliban and al-Qaeda remain vague in
his narrative. The point I would like to make here is that one needs to
differentiate between what the Qur’an says and how Muslims belonging
to different sects, intellectual traditions and mindsets understand and
interpret it. It is also important to attend to what practitioners do either
because of their level of learning or their political affiliations.
Talal Asad emphasises the complexity embedded in religious scrip-
tures: “In fact in Islam as in Christianity there is a complicated history
of shifting interpretations, and the distinction is recognized between
the divine text and human approaches to it” (Formations of the Secular
11). Since Aslam, having described himself as a moderate Muslim, takes
upon himself the “burden of representation”,8 his novels need to fore-
ground this distinction between Islam as faith and the manipulation
of divine text undertaken by radical fundamentalists in the name of
Islam. This becomes more important in the context of recent politicised
framing of 9/11, as Aslam himself says:
Politics for me is about feeling a certain responsibility towards the

world I live in. From my viewpoint, all writing is political – even
non-political writing is political. Coming from Pakistan, and belong-
ing to the Islamic world, I can’t not be aware of how politics affects
our daily lives, how it is not just dry legislations and laws and
statements. It’s visceral. (Book Browse n.p.)
However, Aslam continually blurs this distinction while discussing al-

Qaeda’s or the Taliban’s radical fundamentalism in Afghanistan, as I will
elaborate next.
Set in Afghanistan, The Wasted Vigil is a story of a land and people
ruled by terror under the Taliban. The story revolves around three main
characters: Marcus, Lara and David. Marcus, who is a Muslim convert
and English doctor who has been widowed by the Taliban, lives under
the hope that one day he will find the lost grandson that he has never
seen, having already lost his wife Qatrina and his daughter Zameen.
Lara is a Russian woman who comes to Marcus’s home in search of her
lost brother Benedikt – a former Red Army soldier – after discovering a
connection between Benedikt and Zameen. David – disillusioned with
his job as a spy – is an American former CIA operative who has also
been in love with Marcus’s daughter. He looks after Lara with Marcus.
By creating harrowing images of a war-ravaged landscape, Aslam por-
trays Afghanistan as a symbol of the utter brutality of the Taliban. It is
a place where books are nailed to the ceiling to save them from book
burners, statues of the Buddha are destroyed and “carved and moulded
objects [are] banned by the Taliban” (405). Bonfires of books and the
Global Ummah 185
destruction of “sinful musical instruments” (405) are common phe-

nomena. It is a land where horrible things happen, such as amputation,
decapitation and death by stoning.
In the midst of this gloominess, a glimmer of hope appears in the
novel when Dunia and Casa begin to nurture feelings for each other
and Marcus begins to think that “love is still a possibility in a land such
as this” (358). While using the same prayer mat, Casa feels that “his
feet were where hers had been, his forehead coming to rest where hers
was moments earlier. Her breath and scent were in the velvet nap and
in the cypress trees depicted in the centre, their tips bent to signal that
they too were bowing before Allah” (333). However, even this glim-
mering hope soon fades when love comes into conflict with faith and
Casa realises that he should not forget his duty to his religion. Though
“love means an eradication of selfishness”, in a war-ridden country like
Afghanistan “this selfishness was the main tool of survival, everyone a
mercenary” (358). Therefore, in the case of Casa and Duniya, as with
Marcus and Qatrina or David and Zameen, love is engulfed by war.
Afghanistan is portrayed as a country riddled with Islamic extremism.
In fact, it is “a land whose geology was fear instead of rock, where you
breathed terror not air” (241). The novel exposes the US-propagated
fear of random death at the hands of the Taliban and al-Qaeda through
interactions between the US soldiers, foreigners and jihadists, building
a tale of tension, fear and anger. As James says, these jihadists want to
destroy us (the US); this fear reaches its climax at the end of the novel
when Casa’s hostility towards Americans plunges him into the depths
of zealotry and he blows himself up along with David:
THEY HAVE FALLEN BACKWARDS onto the earth. Managing to free

his right hand from David’s grip, Casa feels along the belt tied to the
waist. Through gritted teeth he says something, his face parallel with
the sky visible through a gap in the foliage. The last words David
hears. The blast opens a shared grave for them on the ground. (423)
Here, Aslam’s purpose is not to target young mujahideen brainwashed by

al-Qaeda in their training camps to fight against “infidels” in the service
of Islam. Rather his resentment, as he states in interview (Book Browse
n.p.), is towards the people who incite animosity towards the US and
make these young people (as James says in the novel) the “children of
the devil [who] have no choice but to spread destruction in the world”
(413). This is what characters like Nabi Khan and Gul Rasool are shown
to be doing to young mujahideen such as Casa and Bihzad, who do not
“know about Islam let alone other religions . . . [they know] little about
Afghanistan let alone the world” (255). Bihzad too, being “a passionate
servant of Allah” carries out one such “glorious act in Jalalabad” and gives
his life in “this jihad against the infidels” by blowing himself up in order
to kill hundreds of children that he believes are “being taught to forget
Islam in that American-funded school” (76–77).
Aslam’s evident outrage at the Taliban’s radicalism is justified in terms
of their extremely orthodox and conservative policies (that have no
room for ijtihad9) as well as the large-scale killings they carried out after
they came to power, such as the massacre of thousands of civilians after
capturing the city of Mazar-e-Sharif (Sheridan n.p.). However, Aslam’s
novel erases differences between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which is
significant in situating Afghanistan within US global politics against
the backdrop of “war on terror” propaganda. The Taliban is a religious
regime rather than an ideological state; it is an organisation with a
political ideology (Kreisler n.p.). The Taliban does not share the jihadist
ideology of al-Qaeda, whose strategies in attempting to set up an Islamic
caliphate, to purge the Holy Lands from Western influence and to coun-
ter US atrocities in the Muslim world, include suicide bombings and the
targeting of innocent civilians. In interview, Aslam acknowledges that:
if you study Osama bin Laden’s speeches sequentially, and also those
of al-Zawahiri [former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad], al-Qaeda is,
I think, tormented by the fact that the world, for better or worse,
has managed to make a distinction between Islam and them, the
Islamists. It is still way short of the ideal, but the world has under-
stood that what al-Qaeda represents is not Islam. They want the West
and the world to think that Muslims are all terrorists. But it is not
going to happen. (Kidd n.p.)
The conversation between Casa and Duniya about the destruction

of the Soviet Union broadly mirrors Aslam’s views about al-Qaeda’s
ideology regarding jihad. Responding to Casa’s comment that “[w]e’ll
destroy America the way the Soviet Union was destroyed”, Duniya tells
him that the Soviet Union was destroyed because it was hated by its
own people. It is not possible to destroy the USA because it “is loved by
its people”. Duniya further argues that Islam can also not be destroyed
because Muslims love Islam. “What we have to make sure is that
Muslims don’t fall in love with the ways of the fundamentalists – then
we’d be in trouble” (319). Aslam believes that “if a billion people love
something, it is hard to destroy” (Kidd n.p.). But by saying this, does
Global Ummah 187
Aslam want to suggest that the cause of Afghanistan’s destruction is the

hatred its people had for the Taliban? Drawing on personal experience,
he claims that “[t]he moment you crossed into Afghanistan, nobody
says they want the Americans to leave. And I talked to everyone! …
They said that if the Americans leave, the Taliban would come back,
al-Qaeda would gain strength” (Kidd n.p.). However, this simplistically
overlooks US hegemony, its power politics and the oil games centred on
the Middle East and South Asia that are linked to current Islamophobic
narratives affecting Muslim identities in the post-9/11 world.
Furthermore, Aslam’s novel, as well as his statement in the interview,
fails to address two main issues. Firstly, the Taliban that have ruled in
Afghanistan should not be conflated with the radicals mushrooming in
Pakistan. Secondly, the distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaeda
remains vague throughout the novel, as is the reason for the decline of
the Taliban’s regime in Afghanistan. As I argued in Chapter 2, Pakistan’s
current chaos is the result of the seeds of Islamic extremism that were
sown in Zia’s regime during the Afghan War.10 While denouncing the
Pakistani government’s support of Islamic radical movements during
the Afghan–Soviet War under Zia’s presidency, the narrator of The
Wasted Vigil says bitterly:
General Zia had accepted a CIA proposal to locate new facilities on

Pakistani soil. Strange sacrifices were required in that shadow-filled
realm, strange compromises. In another month the Soviet Union
would invade Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s corrupt and brutal military
dictator would become a feted ally of not just the United States but
of most of the Western world. (106)
Aslam’s novelistic representation of war-ridden Afghan land suggests

that he is equally resentful towards the Soviet, American and Pakistani
governments that are responsible for the present crippling state of the
country.
However, the whole scenario changed after the attack of 11 September
2001. The Islamic extremists who were trained as mujahideen with US
aid to fight against the Soviets were declared jihadi and terrorists after
the retreat of the Soviets from Afghanistan. As Zahab and Roy say:
“Washington then did what it had previously refused to do, namely
exert pressure on Pakistan to sever its links with the Taliban and with
Bin Laden’s radicals” (56). This shift in the US policy in Afghanistan
from pro-Taliban to anti-Taliban is barely mentioned in The Wasted
Vigil, which has the effect of ruling out the fact that the growth of
the Taliban in Pakistan is the result of a reaction against the collateral

damage inflicted during the US military operations. Commenting on
this paradigm shift from pro- to anti-Taliban and the construction of
“a powerful historical narrative” ( Jackson 78) of a “war on terror”,
Richard Jackson explains that “there is no room for any discussion
about the murky policies of supporting and arming the Mujahaddin in
Afghanistan out of which al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden emerged, or
of the escalating cycle of attack and counter-attack between the US mili-
tary and the terrorists since the First Gulf War” (58). The Wasted Vigil
also fails to capture this holistic picture of the US global politics that
manipulated the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in the name of jihad dur-
ing the Soviet–Afghan War. By contrast, Aslam’s latest novel, The Blind
Man’s Garden, does highlight this distinction between the Taliban and
al-Qaeda and the shift in US policy in Afghanistan from pro-Taliban to
anti-Taliban in a more nuanced way.
Set in Afghanistan and the small village of Heer in Pakistan in the
months after 9/11 when the US declared its “war on terror” and NATO
forces invaded Afghanistan, The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) is Aslam’s
second novel in a series based on the war in Afghanistan and its effects
on the lives of innocent civilians. Whereas The Wasted Vigil captures
the lives of people trapped in the valley of death – Afghanistan – The
Blind Man’s Garden extends its canvas to Pakistan in order to situate
both contemporary Pakistan and Afghanistan in relation to the global
politicised framing of 9/11. Aslam’s latest novel actually bridges the
gap between the two phases of Pakistan’s political history that I have
focused on in this book. The Blind Man’s Garden can be read as a contin-
uation of The Wasted Vigil by featuring the Afghan War and its impact
on Pakistanis and Afghans. As I have been arguing, Zia’s foreign policy
and Islamisation of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s involvement in the Soviet–
Afghan War, have partly contributed towards contemporary Pakistan’s
image as a land of terror.
However, literary representations of the period of Pakistani political
history since 2001 – in which Pakistan has shown solidarity with the US
by countering terrorist activities in Afghanistan – have not yet featured
in this book.11 Aslam primarily focuses on this era in his latest novel.
Pakistan’s involvement through the ISI (or Inter-Services Intelligence) in
this “war on terror” is negatively perceived by the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
This is highlighted in the novel through the character of Kyra and other
members of his school. Kyra is resentful towards the Pakistani govern-
ment that had earlier joined hands with Afghans in their jihad against
the Soviets in the Afghan–Soviet War. However, Pakistan has also
Global Ummah 189
changed its stance on “war on terror” just as the US has changed its pol-
icy from pro-Taliban to anti-Taliban. Kyra, who is running Ardent Spirit,
a training school (madrassa) for jihadists in Pakistan, thus severs its link
with the ISI because of “the alliance that the Pakistani government has
formed with the United States and the West, helping these empires as
they annihilate Afghanistan” (30). Hence, Aslam shifts his focus from
the devastation that the 9/11 attacks brought on Afghanistan in the
form of the war waged by the US coalition forces against the Taliban
and al-Qaeda in The Wasted Vigil, to the impact that the war had on the
innocent civilians of Pakistan.
Despite the problematic conflation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in The
Wasted Vigil, Aslam’s narrative foregrounds the way that Afghanistan
pays the price for sheltering al-Qaeda. Aslam emphasises this fact dur-
ing a conversation between James and Dunia, when he says to her that
Americans are here to “help your country. We came to get rid of the
Taliban for you”. Dunia warns him not to conflate the facts because the
“Taliban regime had been in place for years and no one was particularly
bothered about getting rid of it. You are not here because you wanted to
destroy the Taliban for us, you are here because you wanted retribution
for what happened to you in 2001. I am glad they are gone but let’s not
confuse the facts” (374–375). Dunia’s comment gestures towards the
way the US has used al-Qaeda as a justification to attack Afghanistan
after what happened on 11 September 2001. In fact, the US used the
atrocities of the Taliban to target Osama bin Laden. The US govern-
ment otherwise has no sympathies with the Afghan people, nor had it
previously thought to topple the Taliban government after the Soviet
withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s position did, in fact, become controversial after its stra-
tegic alliance with al-Qaeda in November 2001. Mullah Omar’s decla-
ration on the BBC on 15 November 2001 called for the destruction of
America, and therefore indicated his ideological alignment with Bin
Laden (Zahab and Roy 52). Zahab and Roy argue that “[w]ithout the
role played by al-Qaida, the Taliban, who have never been accused
of playing an active part in the attacks of 11 September, would in
all probability have continued in power. It is a paradox that foreign
influence brought about the fall of the Taliban” (52). After the affilia-
tion between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, “transnational Islamism [was]
carried to the extreme which destroyed both the Taliban regime and
Afghan internationalism” (Zahab and Roy 69). These connections
between the Taliban and al-Qaeda are highlighted in an episode in
The Wasted Vigil when Dunia – after listening to a statement issued by
Osama Bin Laden in response to the martyrdom bombing in Kandhar –

says to David:
These suicide bombings don’t further the cause of Islam as he claims –

they save him and his followers from death, from being handed
over to the USA for reward. He is being protected by people who are
promised millions of dollars in exchange for him. It is in his interest
to keep making and releasing these tapes, to make sure people don’t
forget about him and his so-called jihad. The moment the Muslim
world says, “Osama who?” is the moment that terrorises him. (335)
Aslam’s novelistic representation audaciously exposes the way that

the terrorist activities of al-Qaeda are countered by the institutionalised
violence of the powerful US government and ways in which the latter
legitimises the killing of millions of innocent citizens in the name of
national defence. After the US attack on Kabul to topple the Taliban’s
regime, the narrator in The Blind Man’s Garden rightly says: “The oppo-
site of war is not peace but civilisation [but] civilisation is purchased
with violence and cold-blooded murder. With War” (126). The episode
in The Wasted Vigil in which David and James engage in a conversa-
tion about torturing Casa can be read as a parody of the US rhetoric on
“war on terror” and the legitimisation of illegal acts of state terrorism.
When David warns James that his treatment of Casa is illegal, James
responds with contempt: “Illegal? This is war, David. You’ve been look-
ing into the wrong law books. These are battlefield decisions” (412).
Accentuating post-9/11 Islamophobia, James’s justifications about his ill
treatment of Casa in the novel can be read as reminiscent of the series
of statements given by Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence
under President Bush. In response to a question about whether the US
should have adopted a different strategy so as to avoid the casualties
of innocent civilians, Rumsfeld stated: “We did not start this war. So
understand, responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether
they are innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of
the al-Qaeda and the Taliban” (qtd in Jackson 84).
Rumsfeld’s strategy for the US–Afghan conflict is ironically portrayed
in the novel through the characters of James and Casa. James simi-
larly considers his conflict with Casa not as personal, but as operating
between “us” and “them”. Butler is right in asserting that the cry that
there is no excuse for 11 September has become a “means by which to
stifle any serious public discussions of how US foreign policy has helped
to create a world in which such acts of terror are possible” (Precarious
Global Ummah 191
Life 3). James’s attitude towards the Afghans in the novel resonates with
what Butler highlights in her argument. Thus, James, as a US citizen,
feels that he is justified in torturing and killing jihadists, fundamental-
ists and even innocent people:
We are not responsible for this. If he is half-blind or if he dies of his

wounds – it’s not our fault. And those hundreds who died by chance
in our bombing raids, and those who are being held in Guantanamo
and in other prisons – none of it is our fault. Osama bin Laden and al-
Qaeda and their Islam are answerable for all that. We are just defending
ourselves against them. This is not over? You bet. (Wasted 414)
In The Blind Man’s Garden, Aslam captures the US obsession with Osama
bin Laden and al-Qaeda through imagery of the boots of US soldiers,
which leave perpetual impressions on the Afghan land: “Mikal notices
that the soles of several boots have left deep imprints on the muddy
ground of the bend. America is everywhere. The boots are large as if
saying, ‘This is how you make an impression in the world’” (143). With
reference to the political nature of Pakistani fiction, Shamsie has said
that “[t]he political or historical is embedded in [its] very character”
(Siddiqui n.p.). The same holds true of Aslam’s fictional representation
of the post-9/11 war waged against Afghanistan and Pakistan by the US.
Aslam, in his novels, tends to challenge and problematise Islamophobic
narratives that have affected the lives of common Muslims in the post-
9/11 world.
By foregrounding US animosity against Muslims, as is evident from
James’s aforementioned comment, Aslam can be seen to suggest that
such racial typologies, the stereotyping of Muslims and the synonymis-
ing of Muslimness with terrorism, are merely excuses for the US to
formulate its foreign policy in terms of national survival. Moreover,
“[a] similar mindset came to be consolidated in Britain by a quite sepa-
rate route”.12 This has significant implications for Muslims across the
globe. Given the negative reception of Muslims in British society, also
on the basis of the binarism proposed by US president George Bush,
two major effects can be seen in second-generation Muslims (Allen
84). Either they have become antagonistic towards European societies
or they have chosen to retreat from their cultures of origin in order to
keep their distance from the negative fallout of 9/11. This second cat-
egory involves a moderate approach in terms of affiliation with Islam.
Turning to their religion as a crucial source of identity without showing
any antagonism to European lifestyles, Muslims who follow this latter
path tend to explore the possibilities of reconciling Islam and the West,
as I discussed in the third section of this chapter with reference to Roy’s
and Malak’s interpretative paradigms for distinguishing Islamist from
Muslim.
The purpose of highlighting this fact is to suggest that Muslims in
the diaspora are in fact “doubly marginalized” (Khosrokhavar 240). On
one hand, they experience the marginalisation that stems from their
hyphenated ethnic identities, and on the other they are “othered”
by the West because of the current antagonism towards Muslims and
Islam due to jihadist ideology propagated by al-Qaeda. Anyone deemed
dangerous may be put on trial whether or not criminal acts occurred.13
Butler also highlights this dilemma:
This objectless panic translates too quickly into suspicion of all dark-
skinned peoples, especially those who are Arab, or appear to look so
to a population not always well versed in making visual distinctions,
say, between Sikhs and Muslims or, indeed, Sephardic or Arab Jews
and Pakistani-Americans. Although “deeming” someone danger-
ous is considered a state prerogative in these discussions, it is also
a potential license for prejudicial perception and a virtual mandate
to heighten racialized ways of looking and judging in the name of
national security. A population of Islamic peoples, or those taken to
be Islamic, has become targeted by this government mandate to be
on heightened alert, with the effect that the Arab population in the
US becomes visually rounded up, stared down, watched, hounded
and monitored by a group of citizens who understand themselves
as foot soldiers in the war against terrorism. (Precarious Life 76, 77)
While talking about the Afghans in The Wasted Vigil, James is shown
to express the same panic: “Just look around you, David. Look at the
devastation all around you. These people have reduced their own coun-
try to rubble and now they want to destroy ours” (413). This deliber-
ate conflation of acts of war and acts of terror is at the heart of recent
Western public discourses. Talal Asad draws attention to similar strate-
gies adopted against Islamic resistance movements, which define any
“terrorist operations in Israel” as a “product of evil (exactly like those of
al-Qaeda against the West) because they are part of the Palestinian war
to destroy a sovereign political community”. By contrast, the “assaults
of the Israeli army and airforce in the West Bank and Gaza are therefore
to be seen as pre-emptive self-defence and thus in principle as just war”
(On Suicide 22).
Global Ummah 193
Aslam reinforces more or less the same anxiety in The Wasted Vigil
with regard to the ways that Muslims’ acts of resistance are so easily
labelled terrorist activities by contrast to US practices of violence. As
the narrator says:
These days they keep saying, why do the Muslims become suicide
bombers? They must be animals, there are no human explanations for
their actions. But does no one remember what happened on board
flight United 93? A group of Americans – “civilised” people, not
“barbarians” – discovered that their lives, their country, their land,
their cities, their traditions, their customs, their religion, their fami-
lies, their friends, their fellow countrymen, their past, their present,
their future, were under attack, and they decided to risk their lives –
and eventually gave up their lives – to prevent the other side from
succeeding. He is not wrong when he thinks that that is a lot like
what the Muslim martyrdom bombers are doing. (250)
Aslam appears to be suggesting that this deliberate conflation of acts of

terror and acts of self defence in the wake of 9/11 inevitably resulted
in the discursive creation of a feared “other” in order to create the
impression, via media representations of Muslims, that people are living
in “a state of ontological hysteria” ( Jackson 118). Aslam foregrounds
this state of ontological hysteria in The Wasted Vigil by showing an
interaction between Afghans and US soldiers, ultimately building a tale
of tension and complexity, fear and anger. For example, James’s percep-
tion about the Muslim world is shown to be governed in accordance
with the post-9/11 Islamophobic climate. On the other hand, Muslims
are often shown to be sceptical about the events of 9/11. For example,
when Rohan accompanies Jeo to a hospital in Peshawar in The Blind
Man’s Garden, he hears people talking in the street, anxious about
“‘[w]hy didn’t three thousand Jews turn up for work at the World Trade
Center on 11 September …’ someone is asking, while another says, ‘The
West wants to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons’” (45).
It is interesting to note that the radical version of “fundamentalist”
Islam that is considered to be the root cause of all terrorist activities in
the Europe and the US is a modern phenomenon predominantly mani-
fested in Western societies. Malik asserts that it has nothing to do with
theological or traditional Islam. Kenan Malik argues in his book From
Fatwa to Jihad that people who are considered radicals, such as the ones
who flew planes into the Twin Towers and the ones found guilty of the
suicide bombing on 7/7, are “the children of multicultural” Western
societies (25). They were not brought up in their traditional societies

but in the West. Aslam’s narrator evokes this reality through Marcus’s
comment about his class fellow Muhammad Atta in a university in
Germany: “Most of them had a university education but that education
wasn’t in history or literature or politics … When it came down to it
the terrorists’ opinions and beliefs were as devoid of nuances as Casa’s
seem to be. Viewing the world in very stark terms” (Wasted 357). In real-
ity, none of these terrorists comes from the madrassas of Afghanistan
or Pakistan. They are the product of universities rather than mosques.
Another possible explanation is that the problem perhaps does not lie
within Islamic ideology but with the treatment of Muslims, as Malik
observes: “The Western hatred of Islam makes for Islamic hatred of the
West” (84). This reciprocity implies a return to a neo-Orientalist binary
of “us” and “them”. As Aslam highlights in The Wasted Vigil:
As with monkeys and snakes, the Americans have learnt words like
“jihad”, “al-Qaeda”, “taliban”, “madrassa”.
And in their cunning they know them well enough to be able to
undermine Islam, to turn ordinary Muslims against the holy warriors.
Instead of saying “jihadis”, the newspapers and radio are being advised
to employ the word “irhabis”, which means “terrorists”. Instead of
“jihad:, they are being told to use “hirabah” – “unholy war”. Instead
of “mujahidin’, it’s “mufsidoon” – “the mayhem makers”. (350)
Here, Aslam’s observation reverses Bhabha’s politics of mimicry by

reasserting the authority of colonial discourse. By introducing a model
of ambivalence – “almost the same, but not quite” – in his essay “Of
Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Bhabha
mocks the authority of colonial discourse. According to him, “the
menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambiva-
lence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (Location 88).
Mimicry poses “a threat to both normalized knowledge and disciplinary
powers” by rendering colonial subjects “incomplete” and “virtual” (87).
Inverting Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, Aslam’s novel reinforces ways
in which the “war on terror” has become a dominant political narra-
tive in Europe and the US today, and its power can be analysed by the
way that perceptions about Muslims have changed over a decade from
a “terrorized minority” to a “terrifying majority” (Appadurai, Fear 111).
Aslam’s thematic focus in his novels is also informed by this negative
perception of Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11. As Aslam says in an
interview, “There are a number of authors of my ethnic background
Global Ummah 195
who choose not to be political. If I wanted to, I could also choose not
to be. But with me, I vote every time I write a sentence. I am interested
not in politics per se, but in the effect it has on human beings”.14 Given
the negative stereotypes of Muslims after 9/11, Aslam’s recent novel The
Blind Man’s Garden can be read as a plea for a more tolerant attitude, or
what Gilroy calls “planetary humanism.” Without showing any antago-
nism to the West, Aslam’s characters tend to explore the possibilities of
reconciling Islam and the West, as I will further elaborate with reference
to The Blind Man’s Garden.
Although Mikal suffers at the hands of his own Muslim community
(the Afghan warlords and al-Qaeda) as well as the US soldiers, he is
portrayed as a representative of moderate Muslims. This is highlighted
in the novel through his rejection of the religious intolerance of the
Taliban and al-Qaeda and further emphasised through his sympathy
towards the so-called infidel, the US soldier. Despite being tortured at
al-Qaeda hideouts in Waziristan and American-built military prisons,
Mikal is shown to be struggling to retain sanity in the midst of chaos
and the brutality of war through his love for Naheed: “Love does not
make lovers invulnerable … But even if the world’s beauty and love are on the
edge of destruction, theirs is still the only side to be on. Hate’s victory does not
make it other than what it is. Defeated love is still love” (133). This holds
true for Mikal; his love for humanity is evident through his efforts to
save an American soldier from the Afghans, by putting his own life at
risk. Even when he is tortured by US soldiers for his possible links with
the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Mikal stays calm. David Town, the US inter-
rogator, provokes him with jihadist ideology: “Say something. At least
tell me we infidels will never win against the likes of you because we
love life while you love death” (179). However, Mikal responds with
silence again. Mikal’s suffering at the hands of the US military police
fails to corrupt his inner goodness, which is exemplified in his treat-
ment of the US soldier. Distancing himself from reductive ethno- or
religious-nationalisms, Mikal looks into the “white man’s eyes [that]
are a doorway to another world, to a mind shaped by a different way
of life.” The only thought that dominates Mikal imagination is “[w]hat
kind of a man is he? Is he well spoken, a union of strength and deli-
cacy? Is he in love with someone or is he oblivious? Does he, like Mikal,
have a brother?” (371). In so doing, Mikal becomes a representative of
“Faith, the uncorrupted kind” as compared to “souls hooked darkly to
the corrupted kind. All the ways of error and glory” (297).
Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden to some extent evokes the prob-
lems that Muslims face in the post-9/11 period due to their national
or territorial affiliation. Given this context, the novel focuses on the

notion of ummah that allows Muslims to reframe their identities in
flexible and moderate terms, ultimately liberating them from a terrorist
ontology based on radicalism or religious orthodoxy. In this respect, The
Blind Man’s Garden foregrounds a wide range of modes of affiliation with
the religion of Islam and subsequent modes of self-identification. The
character of Rohan, Jeo’s father and the owner of the mythical garden of
the novel’s title, is both enlightened and traditional in certain respects.
On the one hand, as a moderate Muslim, Rohan leaves Ardent Spirit
when it becomes a breeding ground for fanatics and extremists. On the
other hand, he withholds his wife Sofia’s medicines “till she let go of her
doubts, forcing her to embrace Allah once again before it was too late”
(64). The character of Basie offers a contrast to Rohan’s unquestioning
embrace of Islam. In the novel, Basie would have willingly announced
his atheism, but for the fear of being killed by the Taliban. As he says
to Yasmin, “I’ll announce tomorrow that I don’t believe in Allah or
Muhammad or the Koran … But I’ll be beaten to death by a mob for
being an infidel … But I am not a hypocrite. I’d be a hypocrite if I was
free to say and act what I believed in and didn’t” (257). Tara feels furious
at female Taliban guards for prohibiting women from entering a grave-
yard. At the same time, she commends “the women of Kabul for being
wise enough to stay in their burkas” (113). Whilst such attitudes are
contradictory, they nevertheless problematise the intolerant absolutism
that has been associated with the religion of Islam in the Western media
in the aftermath of 9/11. In addition, such depictions gesture towards a
conflict that prevails among moderate Muslims with regards to Islamic
absolutism and Islamic extremism.
Aslam’s own limited understanding of Islam, more specifically
Islamic jurisprudence and fiqh (which I rebut in the third section of
this chapter), at times contributes towards a neo-Orientalist depiction
of Islam and accentuates the fact that his views about Islam are shaped
by his association with the regional orthodox religiosity of his family.
Nevertheless, his representations of the post-9/11 framing of Muslims
tend to challenge and problematise debates surrounding Islamophobia
in the West. Aslam’s own encounter with orthodox Islam resonates with
his characters’ resentment towards their religion, as their antagonism
towards Islam is also informed by their encounter with the version
of Islam propagated by the Taliban. Basie, Yasmin, Rohan and Tara all
disapprove of the religious intolerance of the extremists. But Aslam’s
novels also provide explanations as to why Muslims across the globe,
particularly second-generation Muslims, are increasingly redefining
Global Ummah 197
their identities on the basis of faith rather than culture, territory or

nation. Aslam suggests that since religion has emerged as a major social
signifier after 9/11, Muslims in diaspora cannot be generalised as one
homogenous group because of the differences in the public performativ-
ity of radical, secular and moderate Muslims. The term “Muslim” has
emerged in recent years as more diverse and encompassing than that
which can be encapsulated by the term “Islamist”.
It is also important to understand that the classical theological
concept of Islamic ummah is not an “imagined community on a par
with the Arab nation waiting to be politically unified but a theologi-
cally defined space enabling Muslims to practice the disciplines of din
[religion] in the world” (Asad, Formations 197). Importantly, this view
of ummah, based on postnational identity, accommodates and embraces
all humanity because of the diversity it carries within itself. Aslam,
by redefining his own identity from transnational British Pakistani to
postnational Muslim, claims to be a part of this global “we”.
This chapter has considered a range of pathologies of dislocation illus-
trated in Aslam’s work, the settings of which span contemporary Britain,
Pakistan and Afghanistan. By dramatising a clash between secular and
Islamic outlooks with regards to first- and second-generation immigrants
as well as between East and West, Aslam’s fiction incorporates two-
dimensional versions of Islam, Muslims and their self-identification.
On one hand, he presents characters who adopt liberal to moderate
positions with regard to racism and religious violence, such as Shamas,
Charag, Marcus, Rohan and Mikal. On the other hand, there are those
who adopt traditional to radical positions, such as Kaukab, Kyra and
Casa. By accentuating the religious fervour of some of his characters,
Aslam tends to speak against the monolithic and absolutist assertions
of Islamic identity. Aslam’s work evokes the problems that Muslims
face in the post-9/11 period due to their national or territorial affilia-
tion. The thematic focus in all of his novels – the clash between reli-
gious and secular worldviews – aims to suggest that “Islam retains an
identity-shaping valence that transcends signifiers of race, gender, class
and nationalism” (Malak, Muslim Narratives 3). He himself celebrates
his own diasporic identity in terms of a postnational affiliation with a
non-territorial global Islam, which I refer to in this book as the global
ummah. His characters also tend to negotiate their identities in terms of
enlightened Islam.
Coda: Re-imagining Pakistan
Emphasising the centrality as well as the profound influence of “war on

terror” discourses in the reframing of Pakistani Muslim identities after
9/11, I have sought to present a big picture of “US realpolitik” in this
book by looking beyond 9/11 contexts in fictional narratives by second-
generation Pakistanis. My main contention has been that a post-9/11
paradigmatic shift in identity formation – from signifiers of race,
gender, class and nationalism to the non-territorial global ummah –
cannot be understood in its entirety without referring to 9/11 as a
political construct rather than merely considering it a civilisational
clash. Situating 9/11 within the parameters of cultural and political
encounters as well as economic Manichaeism has enabled my challenge
to the centrality of “culture talk” surrounding Islamophobic narra-
tives after 9/11. The connection between increased Islamophobia and
9/11 necessarily engenders a particular kind of attention to historical
events such as the “Rushdie Affair”, the Danish cartoon controversy,
the Gulf Wars, the Cold War, the Soviet–Afghan war and the Iranian
Revolution, which have contributed to radical perceptions about Islam
and Muslims (particularly in relation to Pakistan). The present crises
cannot be de-historicised; a series of recent events – including hysterical
protests against the derogatory “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video
(2012), the persecution of religious minorities (particularly Shia Muslim
Hazaras) in Quetta (2013) and the burning of Christians’ houses in
the Badami Bagh area of Lahore (2013) over alleged blasphemy, all of
which epitomise cultural and religious intolerance – are reminiscent of
Muslims’ reactions towards offence in the past. Moreover, the responses
to these historical events serve to articulate new orthodoxies and neo-
conservative narratives about the Muslim ummah. I frequently refer to
the term “terrorist ontology” in my book in order to emphasise the
198
Coda: Re-imagining Pakistan 199
pressing need to respond to Islamophobic narratives in the West, and

to US-led “war on terror” propaganda, which are affecting the lives of
ordinary Muslims in the West.1 Indubitably, such stereotypical images
are transferred to the Western public by global and media forces. Only
recently, in the post-9/11 period, has this hierarchy of Western nar-
ratives been challenged by Pakistani writers who are writing back to
dominant discourses in important ways.
Like 9/11 public discourses, contemporary Pakistani novelistic
responses to terrorism, most significantly “post-9/11 fiction”, cannot
be seen as a de-historicised phenomenon; it is, instead, part of a literary
tradition that has developed over more than three decades. Pakistani lit-
erature written in the aftermath of 9/11 has experienced a “boom” in the
last decade, which has provoked some commentators to contemplate
whether its foundations and paradigms are sound enough to develop in
the future and to contribute towards the nation’s long and rich literary
tradition. In my view, “post-9/11 fiction” cannot be read in isolation. It
is linked to wider Pakistani English language productions, such as pre-
and post-Partition literature, as well as to other second-generation writ-
ings that focus more on the complexities of Pakistani class and culture
(such as corruption, misogyny, honour killings, forced marriages and
tribal customs), rather than situating contemporary Pakistan in a global
context. Nevertheless, both are significant for contextualising post-9/11
fiction in relation to terrorism debates and Islamophobia narratives.
The 1947 Partition and ensuing communal violence, as well as the
manipulation of Islam by a mullah dictator, remains significant in re-
evaluating the political history of Pakistan. Similarly, second-generation
writings that offer a critique of patriarchal and misogynist tendencies
within Pakistani society are equally significant in contextualising post-
9/11 fiction in relation to issues of racism and cultural violence, in
particular honour killings, forced marriages and women’s rights in the
UK. These patriarchal tendencies, which have captured Western atten-
tion since the early 1980s, have undoubtedly contributed to stereotypi-
cal representations of Muslims in the West. Crucially, such patriarchal
tendencies informed the US slogan “save the women” in the aftermath
of 9/11, and the US manipulated such issues to enforce a war against
Afghanistan and to justify drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004. It is
important for Pakistanis to confront recent drone attacks in Pakistan,
but their implications cannot entirely be understood without such con-
textual information. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge
the “divergent views” in these narratives “about the details and dogmas
of the faith” (Malak, Muslim Narratives 152). Moreover, these narratives
reject “racism and comba[t] cultural chauvinism of any stripe or orien-

tation” by recognising and respecting “the Other” and “celebra[ting]
the sanctity of living beings” (Malak, Muslim Narratives 152). Without
such diverse narratives, it is difficult to grasp a holistic picture of what
is happening in contemporary Pakistan.
Returning to my argument about the sudden boom and increased
recognition of Pakistani English writings that negotiate debates sur-
rounding terrorism, it is also important to consider that fiction based on
the “war on terror” has been constantly evolving over the last decade.
The fiction written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 focused more on
dilemmas associated with diasporic Pakistani/Muslims, as exemplified in
Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Shamsie’s Broken Verses and Naqvi’s
Homeboy. Later, a series of novels featuring the war in Afghanistan shifted
the focus from Pakistani diasporas to the devastated land of Afghanistan.
The most significant novels of this category are Gauhar’s No Space for
Further Burials, Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil.
The most recent development in “post-9/11 fiction” can be seen in the
shift of focus to Pakistan against the backdrop of the devastating impact
of US drone attacks. This also registers a shift from the megacities of
Karachi and Lahore to small rural areas and northern Pakistan, which
had previously not featured in mainstream Pakistani writings. Aslam’s
The Blind Man’s Garden is set in the small town of Heer in Peshawar
whilst Khan’s Thinner Than Skin takes readers to the spectacular world of
the Kaghan Valley, the Karakoram and the Pamir mountains. Similarly,
Jamil’s recent publication, The Wandering Falcon (2011) (which does
not negotiate debates surrounding terrorism), features Balochistan and
critiques tribal customs of the Balochi community.
This recent shift opens up further avenues for contextualising
Pakistani “post-9/11 fiction” in relation to tribal brutalities and con-
servative tendencies, which I could not discuss in their entirety given
the available space and time. Although I have discussed ways in which
Islamic punishments, the Hudood Law and Islamic philosophies regard-
ing jihad and honour killings have influenced Islamophobic narratives
and debates surrounding Islamic extremism, these issues have recently
gained more importance in the aftermath of the Taliban’s assassination
attempt (October 2012) on Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old Pakistani girl
in the Swat district of Pakistan. Bina Shah’s recent short story, “The Far
Cry of Doves”, reflects Malala’s story. This new wave of Pakistani writ-
ing exemplifies a process of transition and a constantly evolving literary
tradition, rather than what is often assumed by commentators to be a
sudden boom in the aftermath of 9/11.
Notes
Introduction
1. Although constructions of the “West” as “a collective heritage, an omnivo-
rous melange of cultures” are problematic (see Shohat and Stam 13–15), I use
“West/Western” while discussing general representational issues; otherwise,
I refer more specifically to the UK or the US.
1 How the World Changed: Narratives of Nationhood

and Displaced Muslim Identities
1. I would like to clarify here that Islamic shariat laws such as the Hudood
Ordinance or even the Blasphemy Law must not be conflated with the way
that these laws have been promulgated in Pakistan since the late 1970s,
which still attracts harsh criticism. It is the loopholes within the laws and the
Ordinance that have “encouraged violence and injustices against women”
and have become the subject of many second-generation writers. However,
some writers, such as Nadeem Aslam, are also critical of what they assume to
be conservative tendencies within Islam. In most cases, this highlights the
novelist’s own limited understanding of Islam, as I discuss in Chapter 4. (see
Rahat Imran 78–100).
2. My own work in fact fills the gap left by Bradley and Tate in their book The
New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11. Chambers argues
that Bradley and Tate do not “engage in sufficient depth with the genuine
political grievances that drive extremism, or the way in which Anglo-
American foreign policy may itself be viewed as a form of terrorism”. Through
historical contextualisation of the “9/11 novel” category, I attempt to give
“more nuanced accounts of religion, doubt and multicultural politics”. (See
Claire Chambers, rev. of The New Atheist Novel <http://www.timeshigher
education.co.uk/410565.article>.)
3. In Rushdie’s case, this is just in Shame. Moreover, given that Rushdie’s major
work (for example, Midnight’s Children) deals with the Partition and its effects
on India rather than Pakistan, I focus only on Shame as a novel that is relevant
to this book. Shame provides a critique of 1970s and early 1980s Pakistan that
became the subject of second-generation writers of Pakistani origin who situ-
ate Pakistan in post-9/11 global context.
4. Benazir’s public image with her head covered by a dupatta signifies the fact
that “religion was firmly wrapped up in government”. According to Shamsie,
the impact of Zia’s imposed Islamisation was so strong that successive gov-
ernments after Zia’s continued to be pressurised by religious parties with
regard to Islamic Ordinances promulgated during Zia’s regime; any attempts
to repeal these ordinances remained unsuccessful (see Kamila Shamsie,
Offence 57).
201
202 Notes
5. Allen highlights the way that anti-racism movements among the Asians who
were politically overlooked in the 1970s raised important concerns not only
for their political identity but also for their religious difference. Similarly, the
Race Relations Act of 1976, that excluded religion or belief as markers of iden-
tification, raised important concerns among multi-ethnic religious groups
(such as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) who were still ignored in contrast to
mono-ethnic groups (such as Jews and Sikhs). For details, see Allen (8–10).
6. Being myself a Muslim by faith and by culture, I felt very disturbed by this
juxtaposition. There are certainly very obvious allusions to Islamic history,
such as references to the Prophet’s wives, a mockery of the whole concept of
Revelation and words of God taught to the Prophet on Mount Sinai that might
be lost on a non-Muslim reader, but cannot be ignored by a Muslim one.
Nevertheless, some Muslim readers also defend Rushdie, pleading for freedom
for speech, as is evident from the edited collection by Anouar Abdallah, ed. For
Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech.
7. Sebastian Gunther usefully examines different connotations of terms used
to describe Arabs (“such as people of the bazaar”, “common people”,
“illiterate” or “unlettered”) in relation to Rushdie’s interpretation of people
of the bazaar. Gunther further highlights reasons why the message of the
Prophet made such an impact on Arabs. Gunther’s discussion provides a
rebuttal of Rushdie’s Orientalist interpretation of Arabs and Islam (1–26).
8. Elsayed M.H. Omran discusses the reasons the Prophet’s message made such
an impact on pre-Islamic Arabs, and highlights the strong tradition of oral
literature among them (see Al-Serat n.p.).
9. Malik discusses a few examples of young British Muslims who, although
brought up in secularist traditions, later became affiliated with radical
groups (see Malik 28).
10. See the end of the section “Post-independence novels: Narrating Nationhood”.
11. My use of the term “fundamentalism” while discussing Kureishi’s work is
informed by Kureshi’s own understanding of the phenomenon of young
Asians turning to Islam, which was rampant in 1990s Britain after the fatwa.
According to Kureishi, second-generation Asians in Britain were turning
to “a particularly extreme form [of Islam] often called Fundamentalism”,
although in their Muslim families “the practice of religion … had fallen into
disuse”. I use the loaded term “fundamentalism” in order to highlight the
ways in which it is often used synonymously with Islamic extremism (see My
Son the Fanatic vii).
12. The setting of the film is slightly different from the short story’s. Whilst the
film is set in Bradford, the short story is set in London.
13. Both Shamsie and Aslam foreground increasing Islamophobic feelings in
the West towards practising Muslims who are more ritualistic than other
Muslims; the most commonly targeted examples of this performative aspect
of faith are the beard and hijab.
14. See Part IV “The Taleban” in Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country for
more details of drone attacks in Pakistan; see also Noam Chomsky, Hopes and
Prospects.
15. Wherever I use the word “America” rather than “the US”, it is because the
writers have originally used this word. People in the subcontinent generally
refer to the US as America and to US citizens as “Amreekan” (Americans).
Notes 203
16. My use of the term “fundamentalism” rather than “extremism” here simply
highlights the ironic connotations that Hamid ascribes to this word.
2 Responding to 9/11: Contextualising the Subcontinent

and Beyond
1. Appadurai links indigenous rivalries between India and Pakistan to contem-
porary global politics. According to Appadurai, social, historical and political
conflicts within the subcontinent contribute to negative perceptions about
Muslims, perpetuating the fallacy “that they [Muslims] truly belong not to a
terrorized minority but to a terrifying majority, the Muslim world itself” (see
Appadurai, Fear 111).
2. As a result of Zia’s foreign policy (Pakistan’s stand on Afghanistan and
the decision to accommodate Afghan muhajir) and his efforts to Islamise
laws, varying ethnic, sectarian and national groups began to mushroom in
Pakistan. For example, there was: (a) an influx of Afghanis in the wake of
the Afghan War; (b) a rise in Shia–Sunni conflicts resulting from Zia’s promo-
tion of Sunni Islam due to his own affiliation with a Sunni religious party,
Tablighi Jamaat (Society for Spreading Faith); the launch of the Muhajir
Qaumi Movement or United National Movement (MQM) in 1984, designed
to protect the rights of immigrant communities against Sindhi natives.
Actually, the Sindhi–Muhajir conflict worsened in the 1980s as a result of
new waves of immigration by Pakistani Pashtuns and Afghan refugees to
urban centres of Sindh; rifts between religious communities – for exam-
ple, the rise of the Ahmidiyya community when the religious freedom of
Ahmadiyya community was curtailed in 1984 by a highly repressive military
ordinance issued by General Zia.
3. The language riots in Sindh and Baluchistan gave a new dimension to
identity consciousness in Pakistan. (see Ijaz Khan, “Contending Identities”
50–70).
4. My use of “our” clarifies my own positionality and interest in the topic;
being Pakistani, I understand how our identities have been shaped by these
linguistic and ancestral belongings.
5. The Ahmadiyya community differs from other Muslim communities in its
opinion about Khatam-e-Nabuwat (the finality of prophethood). Rather than
believing that the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is the last prophet of God,
they believe in the continuity of prophethood. Besides Bhutto’s constitu-
tional declaration of Ahmadis as non-Muslims, Zia also promulgated the
notorious anti-Ahmadiyya Ordinance XX that added Sections 298-B and
298-C to the Pakistan Criminal Code. Through this Ordinance, Ahmadis
were deprived of most of their basic human rights and their freedom of faith.
6. Asghar et al. argue that “Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim yet ethnically
diverse society, presents an interesting case study in paradoxes related to
the teaching and learning of biological evolution. The country’s inherited
colonial education system, including modern science education, continues
to be shaped by the Islamisation project initiated by the military ruler
General Zia-ul-Haq in the early 1980s. Evolution features visibly in bio-
logical sciences curricula at the high school, college, and university level.
204 Notes
Nevertheless, conflicting religious perspectives on the origin and creation

of life continue to influence scientists’ notions, teachers’ pedagogic deci-
sions, and the content of secondary biology textbooks related to evolu-
tionary theory” (Ashgar, Wiles and Alters n.p.).
7. The most significant examples are those of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
The devastation of these countries in the name of the US-led “war on terror”
is a part of US global politics. At the same time, US policy in Chechnya and
Kashmir and America’s “long record of relatively uncritical support of Israel”
against Palestine are clear examples of US ventures against Muslim countries
in particular. (For details see Esposito, Unholy War 152–157.)
8. It is interesting to note how Islamic terminology for holy warriors and the
concept of jihad changed after the Afghan War. People who were trained to
fight Soviets were called mujahideen but after the war, when these mujahideen
continued fighting for the cause of Islam, they were termed jihadists as the
connotation of the word jihad also changed. Jihad, which originally meant
to strive or struggle against one’s self, became associated with the violent
struggle of militant groups who came to be known as jihadist. (For details see
Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam.)
9. “Islamic Rage Boy” is America’s hated poster-boy of Islamic radicalism, and
it has become a cult figure on the internet with an image of burning eyes
and straggly beard. The title was first given to Shakeel Ahmad Butt from the
disputed Indian State of Kashmir, who became a professional Muslim pro-
tester after his family suffered at the hands of police in search of militants.
(For details see Morey and Yaqin 26–28.)
10. The allegation of Saddam’s connection with al-Qaeda proved to be untrue
and was considered to be manufactured by the American government to
legitimise their invasion of Iraq. It is important to consider that the secular-
ist vision of Saddam’s Baathist party was completely opposite to al-Qaeda’s
purely Islamist view of jihad. The fact that al-Qaeda went to Iraq to take
part in the war was due to their anti-American sentiments. (For details
see Gerges 252–253 and <http://thepeopleofpakistan.wordpress.com/tag/
the-first-gulf-war>.)
11. With regards to US concerns about weapons of mass destruction in the Gulf
region, Khan argues that if the US is so concerned about weapons of mass
destruction “why does it keep selling them to the only nuclear power in the
Middle East: Israel?” In one of her articles, Khan has quoted Kissinger, who
once asked rhetorically: “Why should the Arabs have all the oil?” and who
would, during the Iran–Iraq War declare, “I hope they kill each other” and
“Too bad they both can’t lose”. For his love of humanity, he was awarded the
Noble Peace Prize in 1973 (“The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War: What
America Says Does Not Go”).
12. Khan here refers to the category of “oppressed Muslim woman” narrative
which, according to her, are not representative of Muslim women and reaf-
firm stereotypes. She gives the examples of Leila’s Married by Force (2006),
Latifa’s My Forbidden Face (2002) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), which
tend to present silent submissive females. I will take up this issue later,
highlighting the rationale and repercussions of such narratives.
13. In addition to novels such as Khaled Husseini’s The Kite Runner, Khan here
refers to memoirs about Muslim women that perpetuate the dictum that
Notes 205
“the West must save the East”. In addition to Married by Force by “Leila” or
My Forbidden Face by “Latifa”, Khan also refers to Choke On Your Lies by Inci
Y and Princess by Jean Sasson. (For details see Khan, “The West Must Save the
East,” <http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2007/12/01/literature.htm>)
3 Re-imagining Home Spaces: Pre- and Post-9/11

Constructions of Home and Pakistani Muslim Identity
1. A congregation hall for Shia ritual ceremonies, especially those associated
with the Remembrance of Muharram.
2. In European traditions, the moon is associated with specific seasons and with
affiliations to goddesses. Many well-known mythologies feature female lunar
deities, such as the Greek goddesses Phoebe, Artemis, Selene and Hecate. The
moon is also associated with women and fertility. European folk tales about
the number thirteen also suggest a lunar origin. (For details see Thompson
145–160 and <http://homestar.org/bryannan/moons.html>.)
3. Soja points out that the feature of a megacity is the difficulty of delineating its
outer boundaries and hence of accurately estimating its population size (235).
4. Stamen’s online cartographic designs and map-based visualisations demon-
strate a similar kind of effort. Examples of this kind of cartography include
City Tracking Pt 2 (a project to change the way people view, talk about and
utilise digital city services, and thereby improve their urban lives), a map for
the London 2012 Olympics, and a Crimespotting map for San Francisco. For
details visit <http://stamen.com/maps>.
5. A term originally used for marquis but now used in Pakistan to denote land-
lords. Dard-e-Dil is one such landlord family whose members are proud of its
lineage and legends.
6. For details about the two events, see <http://dawn.com/2013/03/10/125-
christian-houses-burnt-over-blasphemy/> and <http://www.aljazeera.com/
news/asia/2013/02/2013216133651823848.html>.
7. Martial Law has been declared in Pakistan three times: by Iskandar Mirza in
1958; by General Yahya Khan in 1969; and by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977.
8. See Bonnie TuSmith’s idea of “extensive self” or extensive identity that
suggests a view of the “world that is cosmic and holistic rather than com-
partmentalized” (qtd in Zhang 132). The holistic view of con-temporality is
crucial for overcoming the sense of unbelonging produced by the experience
of diaspora and displacement.
4 Global Ummah: Negotiating Transnational Muslim

Identities
1. According to the Islamic view of marriage, halala refers to a situation when,
after divorce, a husband cannot re-marry his wife and vice versa until the
wife has married another husband and he has divorced her for a genuine
reason.
2. A term originally used for the landed gentry but now used in Pakistan to
denote landlords.
206 Notes
3. By this, I mean the time and context in which the Prophet prohibited the
making of portraits. It was at a time when Arabs, who were polytheistic,
were taught by the Messenger to worship God alone. This was preceded
by the clearance of Kabah from all the man-made deities. Portraits made
by artists during that time were entirely devoted to idol worship. It was
in that context that the Prophet warned people against making portraits –
which could be devoted to idol worship by the Arabs – so as to discourage
polytheism. The portraits made by artists in today’s era are neither meant to
compete with God’s creation nor are they used for the purpose of worship.
Secondly, one must differentiate verses that refer to fundamental tenets
of the Qur’an, which are universal and do not require contextualisation,
from those that require contextualisation by virtue of referring to specific
incidents and situations.
4. The Qur’an says: So if a husband divorces his wife (for a third time), he can-
not, after that remarry her until after she has married another husband and
he has divorced her. In that case, there is no blame on either of them if they
re-unite, provided they can keep the limits ordained by Allah. Such are the
limits ordained by Allah, which He makes plain to those who know (2:230).
5. For details see Maryam, “Exposition of the Proof that the Nikah of Intentional
Halala is Invalid” n.p. <http://tarjuman.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/ibtaal_
tahleel.pdf>. This is also verified by hadith Tirmizi in which the Prophet
has cursed the people who marry each other with an intention of divorce
(Vol. 1, page 133).
6. Honour killings, or what are more accurately termed “dishonour killings”,
are described as an integral feature of all patriarchal societies and were
outlawed by the prophet Muhammad (PBUH), as evidenced by texts in the
Qur’an. (For details see Martin 256–258.)
7. The words chanted by Casa are taken from Surah al-Anfal: “When thy Lord
inspired the angels, (saying): I am with you. So make those who believe
stand firm. I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Then
smite the necks and smite of them each finger” (8:12). What Aslam fails
to highlight is the context in which these words were said in the Qur’an.
Surah Al-Anfal particularly discusses the events of the battle of Badr when
the Prophet Muhammad, along with his companions, was confronted with
many difficult situations. Their property and wealth were seized and they
were often under threat of attack. In the battle, the Prophet and his com-
panions were outnumbered by three times as many of the opposing forces,
yet Allah granted them victory. This surah enunciates the general principles
of war (one aspect of jihad) and peace, while reviewing the battle of Badr
and using them for the moral training of Muslims, rather than provoking
Muslims to start killing non-Muslims. This is also evident from the follow-
ing Qur’anic verses: “It is not for any prophet to have captives until he
hath made slaughter in the land. Ye desire the lure of this world and Allah
desireth (for you) the Hereafter, and Allah is Mighty, Wise. Had it not been
for an ordinance of Allah which had gone before, an awful doom had come
upon you on account of what ye took. Now enjoy what ye have won, as law-
ful and good, and keep your duty to Allah. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
O Prophet! Say unto those captives who are in your hands: If Allah knoweth
any good in your hearts He will give you better than that which hath been
Notes 207
taken from you, and will forgive you. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. And
if they would betray thee, they betrayed Allah before, and He gave (thee)
power over them. Allah is Knower, Wise” (8: 67–71).
8. As Aslam says in an interview: “[w]hy as a writer, would you not want to talk
about that if you’re from that area?” See Chambers, British Muslim Fictions
153.
9. Ijtihad means independent reasoning and rethinking. According to Iqbal
(117), ijtihad is a means to promote formation of an independent judgment
on a legal question.
10. Aslam is one of the generation of writers – which includes Kamila Shamsie,
Mohsin Hamid, Mohammad Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin – who grew up in a
time when the country was ruled by a military dictator Zia-ul-Haq. The latter
is often criticised by all these writers for his religious fanaticism as well as his
support for the Taliban in Pakistan, with the aid of the US.
11. Second-generation writers whom I analyse in this book have focused more
on either Zia’s era in terms of the long-term repercussions of 9/11 events for
Pakistan, or on how the lives of Pakistani diasporic communities in the US
and the UK have been under siege since 9/11.
12. Pierce argues that the UK government also tends to “condemn those con-
sidered to be soft on terrorism”. Where the US government carried out all
atrocities against Muslims openly, the UK government adopted compara-
tively covert techniques in the form of stealth torture that leave “no visible
trace and could safely be denied” (5–9, 11). Tony Blair also talks about the
British government’s solidarity with the US in its war against terrorism in
his autobiography. He says: “We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder
to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like
them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world” (for detail, see
Blair 352).
13. See Allen in the European Monitoring Centre’s 9/11 report about negative
and discriminatory acts perpetuated against Muslims and against ethnicities
that are associated with Islam (113).
14. <http://www.newageislam.com/islam-and-the-west/british-pakistani-author-
nadeem-aslam--i-am-made-in-the-east-and-assembled-in-the-west/d/10192>
Coda: Re-imagining Pakistan

1. The most recent example is that of the Boston bombing, when the Western
media so quickly and conveniently started to demonise and brand an entire
Muslim community on the basis of the ethnic origins of the suspects.
I have myself recently been denied a visa to present my work in an inter-
national arena and the inexplicable delay in processing my application by
the Canadian Embassy highlights a similar problem. My ethnic identity as a
Pakistani Muslim was perceived to be a risk to their security.
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Index
7/7 London bombings, 4, 134, 157 beard, 4, 39, 40, 56, 177, 202
9/11 attacks/ events, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, Beautiful from This Angle, 65–72
16, 19, 37, 41, 46, 54, 61, 75, 109, Bhabha, Homi K, 10, 100, 130–133,
142, 144, 157, 171, 172, 175, 176, 145, 146, 165, 194
182, 189, 193 Bhutto, Benazir, 25, 49, 51, 52, 66,
201n
A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 20, Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 8, 21, 24, 49, 52
45–49 Bilgrami, Akeel, 175
A God in Every Stone, 149–156 Bin Laden, Osama, 4, 49, 102, 134,
Abbas, Tahir, 29–31 186, 187–191
Abu-Lughod, Lila, 30, 62, 64, 109, 110 binarism, 6, 7, 12, 33, 134, 145, 149,
Afghanistan, 2, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 18, 153, 191
19, 45, 46, 47, 48, 56, 58, 61, 62, Blair, Tony, 207n
64, 74, 75, 78, 85, 92, 93, 94, 96, blasphemy, 31, 32, 34, 38, 84, 135,
97, 98, 101, 102, 106, 109, 110, 198, 205
137, 138, 141, 143, 144, 146, 156, Blasphemy Laws, 19, 28, 50, 89, 103,
162, 163, 170, 171, 173, 183, 184, 111, 137, 139, 201
185–189, 191, 194, 197, 199, 200, Brah, Avtar, 10, 163, 164
203n, 204n British Raj (the British Empire), 149,
Ahmadis, 88, 89, 139, 203 152, 154
Ahmed, Rehana, 12, 128 burden of representation, 74, 184
Ahmed, Sara, 10, 11, 63, 83, 86, 88, Burnt Shadows, 12, 113, 126, 127, 137,
92 139–145, 148–149, 156, 200
Al Qaeda, 8, 16, 19, 52, 62, 75, 93, 98, burqa, 16, 30, 42, 48, 65, 68, 75, 105,
101, 137, 147, 148, 152, 163, 172, 106, 109, 110, 111, 155
183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189–192, Butler, Judith, 7, 53, 144, 145,
195, 204n 146, 166–167, 169, 172, 174,
Allen, Chris, 4–6, 40, 191, 202n, 207n 190–192
ancestry, 12, 80
Anderson, Benedict, 91, 123, 165 cartography, 122, 125, 205
anti-Americanism, 97 Chambers, Claire, 37, 40, 57, 67, 75,
anti-semitism, 3, 4 102, 183, 201n, 207n
Appadurai, Arjun, 3, 73, 94, 120, Chambers, Iain, 79, 80, 86, 87, 89, 94,
139–140, 141, 158, 194, 203n 165, 166, 170
Arab, 3, 4, 33, 58, 86, 100, 101, 103, Chomsky, Noam, 8, 13–14, 202n
134, 192, 202n, 204n, 206n Christians, 43, 103, 135, 139
Asad, Talal, 184, 192, 197 Cilano, Cara, 52, 117, 119
Aslam, Nadeem, 2, 7, 10, 13, 20, 37, Civilising Mission, 153–154
41, 70, 79, 98, 112, 157–166, Cold War, 6, 75, 96, 97, 105, 137,
172, 175, 176–191, 193–197, 200, 198
201n, 202n, 206n, 207n cosmopolitanism, 50
assimilation, 21 cyberspace, 125–126, 128
219
220 Index
Danish cartoon controversy, 137, 198 Huntington, Samuel P, 4, 6, 10, 110,

diaspora, 9–12, 16, 21, 75, 76, 113, 151
114, 118, 121, 125, 128, 133, 148, Hussein, Abdullah, 21
156, 161, 174, 175, 192, 197, 200, Hussein, Saddam, 92, 101, 102
205n Hutcheon, Linda, 22, 33–35
dislocation, 16, 79, 115, 116, 117,
120, 127, 157, 161, 162, 197 Ice-Candy Man, 22–23
disorientation, 12, 101, 159 Identity
and home, 1, 13, 16, 112, 113, 128
Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian, politics of, 28, 31, 37, 41, 72, 74, 86
12, 80–82, 166, 174 postnational, 11, 13, 17, 156, 157,
ethnocentrism, 2, 113, 114, 118, 134, 197
135, 139, 156 formation, 36, 42, 73, 158, 198
constructions of Pakistani Muslim
fatwa, 28–29, 31, 34–35, 37–38, 182 identities, 2, 7, 11, 112, 119, 205n
feudalism, 15, 43, 50, 52, 65 ijtihad, 186, 207
forced marriages, 42, 70, 106, 109, Imaginary Homelands, 35, 115, 121
180, 181, 199 In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, 44
Freud, Sigmund, 166–167, 172 Innocence of Muslims, 30, 103, 137,
fundamentalism, 2, 3, 5, 24, 30, 33, 198
37, 38, 39, 40, 55, 56, 57, 58, 110, Iqbal, Allama Muhammad, 207n
112, 138, 139, 142, 151, 175, 184, Iran, 14, 35, 76, 92, 93, 94, 99, 102,
202n, 203n 173, 204n
Iranian Revolution, 6, 29, 92, 198
Gauhar, Feryal, 15, 18, 41, 45, 61–65, Iraq, 9, 74, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100,
98, 200 101, 103, 106, 173, 204n
gender, 25, 26, 47, 57, 63, 70, 75, 81, Islamic 9
105, 106, 109, 146, 197, 198 Islamic Rage Boy, 101, 145, 204
Gilroy, Paul, 127, 145, 149, 156, 172, Islamism, 29, 36, 40, 41, 58, 61, 90,
173, 195 189
Guantanamo, 143, 145, 171, 191 islamophobia, 3–6, 8, 12, 13, 15, 19,
Gulf Wars (the First and the Second), 20, 29, 30, 110, 111, 112, 133,
6, 8, 16, 74, 75, 98, 198 136, 137, 144, 148, 149, 190, 196,
198, 199
halala, 160, 178–179, 205, 206n
Hamid, Mohsin, 20, 37, 41, 45, jihad, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 16, 19, 28, 48, 52,
54–59, 60, 61, 200 59, 74, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98,
Herbert, Caroline, 119–120 102, 112, 136, 137, 141, 142, 148,
hijab, 4, 202 152, 153, 163, 175, 177, 186, 188,
home, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 27, 30, 41, 190, 200, 204n, 206n
55, 79, 80, 83, 86, 94, 112, 113, jihadism, 1, 65
114, 115–121, 124, 126, 127, 128, Jihadists, 6, 8, 59, 67, 101, 171, 172,
130–133, 143, 148, 157, 158, 160, 183, 185, 189, 191, 204n
161–166, 168, 170, 173, 174 jihadist movements, 8, 16, 75, 97,
Home Boy, 59–61 98
honour killing, 62, 65–71, 159, jihadist culture, 15, 18, 45
178–181, 199, 200, 206 jihadist rhetoric, 101
Hudood Ordinance/ Hudood Law, 4, jihadist ideology, 182, 186, 192, 195
5, 19, 46, 47, 137, 179, 200, 201n Jussawalla, Feroza, 32–33
Index 221
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, 22, 91, 108 and Gulf Wars, 98, 100, 102
Karachi and Afghan Jihad, 97, 98, 102
as megacity, 77, 86, 114, 123, 138, and Afghanistan, 14, 110
200 mainstream US, 13
city space of, 114, 124 propaganda, 8–9, 14, 65, 98
crimes and violence in, 8, 43, 119, Meer, Nasar, 4–5, 133, 134
124, 135 melancholia, 82, 127, 128, 166, 167,
ethnocentrism and sectarianism in, 169, 172–174
12, 21, 76, 77–79, 82, 87, 88, 95, Middle East, 2, 8, 9, 19, 58, 73, 75,
116, 118–120, 124, 128, 134, 139 77, 92, 94, 98, 99, 100, 102, 110,
immigrants in, 77–79, 82–83, 119, 183, 187, 204n
130, 148 migration, 11, 29, 77–80, 83, 112, 113,
map of, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 123, 127,
125, 132, 133 141, 143, 148, 159, 163, 166, 203n
influx of weapon in, 142 and homecoming, 113–115, 126
Kartography, 12, 23, 113, 114, 115–126, and translation, 121
130, 132, 139, 160, 161, 164 minorities, 5, 16, 88, 135, 138, 139,
Khan, Uzma Aslam, 2, 7, 15, 62, 198
73–77, 79–80, 82–91, 94–106, misogyny, 25, 43, 62, 199
109–111, 112, 138–139 Modood, Tariq, 5, 133
Khanna, Ranjana, 82, 127, 167 Mohammed, Hanif, 15, 18, 41, 43,
Khudai Khidmatgar, 151–155 45–49
Kureishi, Hanif, 10, 30, 31, 36–41, Moore, Lindsey, 174, 181, 182
176, 202n Morey and Yaqin, 36, 100, 101, 106,
145, 294n
Leila in the Wilderness, 181 Mueenuddin, Daniyal, 41, 42, 44,
Lieven, Anatol, 119, 153, 202n 207n
muhajir, 8, 77, 78, 79, 83, 85, 87, 88,
madrassa, 8, 93, 137, 176, 189, 194 89, 95, 116, 119, 120, 140, 203n
Malak, Amin, 9, 10, 18, 31, 34–35, 175, mujahideen, 8, 17, 46, 49, 62, 88, 89,
176, 181–183, 192, 197, 199, 200 93, 95, 96, 97, 112, 124, 134, 137,
Malik, Kenan, 30, 35–36, 193–194, 139, 143, 146, 147, 170, 171, 185,
202n 187, 204n
Mamdani, Mahmood, 6, 75, 97, 100, mullah, 24, 45, 47, 67, 138, 176, 189,
105 199
maps, 83, 117–126, 132, 133 Musharraf, Pervez, 41, 42, 44, 207
(Internet mapping, 122, 125, 126) Muslimness, 3, 5, 60, 119, 135, 136,
(cognitive mapping, 114, 124) 144, 191
(map-making, 114, 117, 123, 126) My Son the Fanatic, 36–40
(memory maps, 120, 126)
(national maps, 120) Naqvi, H.M, 15, 18, 20, 41, 45, 54,
Maps for Lost Lovers, 158–162, 59–61, 200
164–170, 178–180 Nash, Geoffery, 31, 36, 54, 55, 58
Meatless Days, 23–24, 26 nationalism(s), 10, 12, 13, 24, 61, 77,
media 82, 83, 88, 91, 92, 113, 114, 118,
representations of Muslim, 5, 13–14, 119, 129, 134, 158, 173, 182, 195,
29, 30, 144, 173, 193, 199, 207n 197, 198
and ‘war on terror’/9/11, 14, 15, 39, nationhood, 18, 23, 24, 26, 158, 162,
65, 97, 98 202n
222 Index
native informant, 154 Rushdie, Salman, 10, 23, 24, 25, 26,
nikah, 160, 178, 206n 28, 29, 31–37, 111, 115, 121, 176,
No Space for Further Burials, 61–65 201n, 202n
Nussbaum, Martha C, 71–72
Said, Edward, 20, 57, 154, 181
ontology Salt and Saffron, 12, 23, 113, 115,
terrorist, 3, 17, 135, 136, 158, 196, 128–132, 160, 164
198 Santesso, Esra Mirze, 11, 101, 159
migrant, 158, 175 Saudi Arabia, 48, 91, 92, 93, 99, 100
Orientalism, 65, 105, 154 Season of the Rainbirds, 7, 20, 177
otherness, 5, 10, 24, 63, 79, 80, 84, sectarianism, 91, 92, 135, 139, 157
131, 133, 145, 148, 149, 156, 157, sectarian identities, 89, 91, 94, 134
160, 164, 173 Sethi, Ali, 15, 18, 45, 49–54
Ottoman, 149, 151 Shah, Bina, 200
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, 41, 43 Shahraz, Qaisara, 41, 42–43
Shame, 23, 24–26, 29
Pakistani Shamsie, Kamila, 2, 3, 7, 10–13, 16,
(immigrants, 2, 37, 67) 17, 20, 23, 41, 74, 79, 98, 111,
(identity, 1, 2, 7, 11, 21, 56, 73, 80, 112–144, 147–61, 164, 191, 200,
88, 91, 121, 143, 198) 201n, 202n, 207n
(diaspora/diasporics, 2, 7, 9, 12, shariah, 89, 93
13, 16, 19, 39, 41, 74, 75, 76, 95, Sidhwa, Bapsi, 21–23
120, 200) Sindhi, 8, 77, 78, 79, 82, 85, 89, 95,
(writers, 2, 6, 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 24, 120, 203n
30, 37, 40, 41, 44, 48, 72, 75, 79, Soja, Edward, 114, 122, 123, 205n
98, 139, 142, 175, 199) Soviets, 8, 46, 48, 52, 95, 96, 97, 137,
(community, 10, 60, 75, 76, 92, 141, 143, 187, 188, 204n
134, 158, 159, 160, 164) Spivak, Gayatri, 109, 131
Partition, the (1947, 1971) stereotypes, 13, 17, 45, 74, 100, 101,
Pashtun, 77, 149, 152–153, 155, 203n 105, 115, 132, 140, 152, 157, 173,
patriarchy, 27, 50, 52, 53, 70, 81 195, 204n
performativity of faith, 40, 60, 145 strangerness, 63, 87, 159, 160, 174
Peshawar, 78, 142, 149–153, 155, 163, subaltern, 7, 55, 61, 72, 109, 131
193, 200 subalternity, 131, 164
Phillips, Maha Khan, 14, 15, 18, 41, Suleri, Sara, 21, 23–28, 33, 34, 148
45, 65–72 sunnah, 179
pluralism, 156
Poole, Elizabeth, 14, 136 Talbot, Ian, 51–52, 148
propaganda, 8, 9, 14, 65, 96, 97, 98, Taliban, the, 16, 19, 46, 49, 52, 61,
102, 105, 111, 134, 135, 145, 173, 62, 74, 75, 89, 94, 96, 97, 110,
176, 186, 199 136, 141, 152, 164, 171, 177,
purdah (see burqa), 122, 155 183, 184–190, 194, 195, 196,
207n
racism, 3, 4, 5, 40, 41, 122, 127, 134, terrorism, 1–3, 6, 13, 14, 16, 19, 49,
149, 197, 199, 200, 202n 51, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66,
Roy, Olivier, 97, 121, 175, 176, 187, 70, 75, 98, 100, 101, 105, 134,
189, 192 136, 144–146, 153, 157, 174, 175,
Rushdie Affair, the, 6, 15, 28, 30, 31, 182, 190, 191, 192, 199, 200,
34–36, 38, 40, 41, 111, 137, 198 201n, 207n
Index 223
The Black Album, 36–40 US, the

The Blind Man’s Garden, 12, 158, US Army, 8, 48, 61, 62, 63, 93, 102,
163–164, 177, 180, 188–193, 137, 145, 170, 171
195–196, 200 US foreign policy, 14, 57, 97, 144,
The Broken Verses, 20, 115, 127, 132, 190
135–139, 142, 144, 200
the CIA, 46, 48, 49, 85, 127, 145, 146, ‘war on terror’
151 language of, 140
the Clash of Civilisations, 4, 6, 10, 15, media and, 65, 173
20, 110, 113, 128, 151, 156, 198 propaganda of, 8, 65, 96, 105, 111,
The Geometry of God, 7, 15, 20, 73, 135, 145, 186
74–77, 84–86, 89–109 rhetoric of, 1, 3, 6, 15, 41, 46, 61,
The Holy Woman, 42–43 72, 75, 98, 144, 170, 190
the ISI, 49, 93, 141, 188, 189 Islam and, 103, 133
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 20, Muslim stereotyping and, 60, 73,
54–61 98, 100, 113, 135, 137, 142, 144,
The Satanic Verses, 28, 29–37, 182 194, 199
The Wasted Vigil, 20, 158, 162–166, Pakistan and, 75, 102, 152, 183
170–174, 176–177, 180, 183–190, Muslim identity and, 16, 41, 55,
192–194, 200 113, 198
The Wish Maker, 49–54 gendering the, 41, 42, 62, 64, 68,
Thinner Than Skin, 95, 104, 200 72, 105, 109, 111
transnationalism, 12, 129 fiction based on, 1, 200
Trespassing, 15, 73, 74, 76–103, 105, World Trade Centre, 157
106 writing back, 2, 199
Typhoon, 42–43
xenophobia, 3, 4, 12, 55, 112, 133,
ummah 140, 148, 173
Muslim, 8, 28, 30, 36, 75, 85, 89,
94, 102, 111, 137, 156, 157, 198 Zardari, Asif Ali, 51
Global, 2, 7, 9, 12, 17, 19, 37, 39, Zia-ul-Haq, 8, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 24,
41, 72, 175, 197, 198 28, 45–48, 50, 52, 74, 77, 84–85,
Universal, 182 87–95, 98, 102, 107, 112, 117,
Islamic, 92, 197 134–139, 141–142, 156–157,
uncanny, 132–133 187–188, 201n, 203n, 205n,
uprooting, 83, 163 207n

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Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction

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Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds

I am indebted to numerous people for their support during the writ-

me strength and motivation throughout. Thanks to Dr Munazza Yaqoob

last decade, and it is important to document the way that Pakistani

Pakistani Muslim identities in the aftermath of 9/11

Fictional representations of Islam and Muslim identities by writers of

terrorism is “uniquely seen as ‘Islamic terrorism’ [and that] all Muslims

identify the causes and consequences of Islamophobia with any preci-

that is invidiously premised on distinct cultures and civilisations, “each

that “unless proved to be ‘good’, every Muslim was presumed to be

Historical contextualisation of “post-9/11 fiction”

By considering the re-framing of Pakistani identities in the aftermath

which was inaugurated by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but then strengthened

security”, “harmony” and “Americanism”, the US state propaganda in

After 9/11: Contextualising the home–diaspora nexus

While the foregoing provides significant contextualisation to my discus-

emotionally in the culture and civilisation of Islam but is also, I argue,

Given this context, the idea about “homeland orientation” (temporal,

uses the term “disorientation” to describe the identity crises of Muslim

which is subsequently challenged by the second generation who move to

as a leading locus of terrorism in the world, partly as a result of media

currently residing in London, is extremely critical of “rampant cor-

Chapter 1 surveys a new wave of second-generation writers of Pakistani

foreground cultural, political and historical causes that underlie recent

Whilst reflecting upon the diversity of Muslim writings in English in

new category of Pakistani fiction in English on the basis of two main

latter under the rubric of “post-9/11 fiction” (examples include Hamid’s

Narrating history: Partition and post-independence

While talking to Alok Bhalla on the issue of Partition, Intizar Husain

its central role in the making of Pakistani identities in the wake of

Partition novels: narrating traumas

Post-independence novels: narrating nationhood

“the force of gravity”, forming a distorted and fragmented “palimpsest

Another feature that links Rushdie’s novel to Suleri’s is the nexus

Rushdie embeds his rereading of history into a revision of the psy-

Rushdie himself seems to suggest in Shame that the inclusion of women

I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an

With reference to the suppression of women in Pakistan’s patriarchal

went to great lengths to disguise her looks” (Rushdie, Shame 169–170),

Partha Chatterjee’s work useful in highlighting how women’s role in

The “Rushdie Affair” as a catalyst to Muslim identity

continued to underpin public and critical discourses in the West about

mainstream perceptions about Muslims as barbaric and intolerant.

Pakistan’s Punjab province who was murdered by his own bodyguard

a Muslim reader reads it as an insult to the Prophet’s wives. In other

This episode is conceived so licentiously that many practising Muslims

(Imaginary 384). In “In God We Trust”, Rushdie Orientalises Islam and

responses towards Rushdie’s novel. Malak’s hypothesis is also based on

powerful community” (18–19). The way that Muslims gathered for

Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and My Son the Fanatic

extremism. His stories, by dramatising the clash between faith and

and hedonism – the demands of militant Islamic extremists at the time

While Riaz is portrayed as a stereotypical Muslim fundamentalist who

nationalities … gathered there” and it was difficult to “tell which coun-

In the midst of corruption there can be purity” (76). After discovering

Kureishi’s short story, although written before 9/11, is significant as

A new wave of second-generation writers of

As stated earlier, in this monograph I aim to emphasise how contempo-

interrogate fictional narratives highlighting the stories from the Muslim

invite a complex post-colonial and post-harem critical perspective